Well, I finally caved. Despite my skillful month+ long avoidance of the six dreaded boxes of Mystery Writers of America financial materials, last week I had to "man up" and face the folders of bills, envelopes bursting with canceled checks or deposit slips, booklets full of account stubs, and ledgers galore. My initial reluctance to deal with these materials stems from the stigma that my mind must have attached to finances. No, they aren't pretty. The stationary is never ornate (at least not these from second-half of the twentieth century). It's also highly unlikely that I would happen across any juicy or otherwise thought provoking details while flipping through to gauge general folder contents and date ranges, as I often do with materials of other genres. Financial records, at least in my opinion, are not necessarily interesting in an overt or otherwise independent sense. However, surely I understand that when considered as a group or in tangent with other related documents, their evidential value can potentially shed insightful light on the practices and interests of the record creating/compiling body. For this reason, the Lilly desires to retain all financial records--regardless of how minute.
I believe I mentioned a few posts back that the Indiana University Archives, where I also work as a processor, has appraisal policies which dictate the exclusion of financially oriented items such as significant volumes of itemized receipts or account statements. Major financial documents (such as annual budgets or statements which provide a broad overview of financial standings) are retained because they can say a lot about an organization or person without taking up significant space; itemized financial documents tend to accumulate quite quickly! However, I sense that the IU Archives, which documents institutional memory in relation to departments, specific people, or groups affiliated with the University, rejects detailed financial records to avoid voluminous duplication of information shared among multiple collections, as well as because informational value is generally extremely low among these documents. Even the evidential value fades after significant time passes, when weighed against processing time and precious shelf space. Because so few reference requests come in to the Archives in regards to financial information (i.e. to what charities Prof. So-and-so donated in what specific amounts in December of 1963, or how much an academic department spent on coffee for the break room each week from 1952-1976), and because navigating disorganized financial records can be incredibly taxing, it further makes sense to me that this is one content area that is easy to justify not retaining.
Still, I can see why these records will be saved in regards to the Mystery Writers of America mss. at the Lilly. For one, the organization is much smaller than something so big as an entire university system. MWA has only been in existence since 1945, and the Lilly currently holds its entire inactive administrative record. In this situation, financial details documenting the group's formative years and those from subsequent decades may play a worthwhile role in preserving the organization's history. I hope that this rational does, in fact, sound rational. It seems a bit hard to articulate, though it all makes sense in my head (very reassuring, I know).
Anyhow, any attempt at theory aside, I spent the week wrapping up series arrangement and got a good start on wrangling the financial documents. The hardest part about processing this series for me is determining document genres. I try to mentally recreate the business processes of the organization--the cycle of disbursements, receipts of payment, various avenues of funding--but in the end, sometimes it's easier to leave a bit of that up to the researcher. When obvious, I retained folder titles as they were written upon arrival. For items such as unlabeled ledgers, I chose to err on the side of caution and arranged all of these chronologically, though some ledgers overlap and were obviously kept to document different purposes. This made sense to me, however, because from the average researcher's perspective, it seems easier to approach things chronologically than categorically for a more holistic approach. The collection is also still small enough that having to do a little digging wouldn't be too arduous. Overall, this "think like a researcher" strategy has been very helpful with my processing projects, especially when I let my nit-picky perfectionism start to take over and need to ground myself in terms of what the real goals and expectations are in description and categorical analysis.
I anticipate that I will complete arrangement of the financial series during week Fifteen, after which I'll clean up my inventory a bit (I have a horrible "notes to self" habit), then send it along to Craig and Cherry. After the inventory's official approval, I can start on refoldering and reboxing. There are a few items set aside for the Preservation department to address (two fragile scrapbooks, the brittle 100+ year old pulp magazines, and some oversized newspapers; more on all that next week). At this point, I doubt that all this will be completed by the end of the semester, but you never know! As usual, I'll keep you updated. Either way, the Mystery Writers of America mss. is well on its way to intellectual arrangement, description, and access! What a beautiful archival cycle.
Amy
PS: One more article abstract to come... and hopefully some more photos to round out the semester.
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