Introduction [SLIDE 1]

First let me give you a little background about our repository. The Special Collections Research Center at Swem Library at the College of William & Mary encompasses University Archives, and Manuscripts and Rare Books, and the Warren E. Burger papers (though they are closed to researchers until 2026)

• We have over 35,000 volumes in our Rare Books Collection, ranging from the 15 th century to the present. [SLIDE 2]

• The Manuscript Collections – there are more than 700 – are focused on 19 th century Virginia, with some earlier collection and increasingly 20 th century materials as well. Anything from personal papers, business and organization records, reflecting daily lives of Americans of all background as well as political events of national importance.

• University Archives collects material documenting the history of the College of William & Mary from the late 1600s to the present: among the materials present are official college records, student publications, photographs, blueprints, posters, audiovisual collections and of course, faculty and student research and the papers of alumni. And since William & Mary does not have a history museum, we also have a large artifact collection.

Access situation in 2007

The access we were able to provide by 2007 differed greatly for the 3 groups I just outlined: • The Rare Books had bibliographic entries in the Library’s online catalog, so they were in

good shape. • All 700+ Manuscript Collections had collection level records in the Library’s online

catalog, but only about 100 had EAD finding­aids. [SLIDE 3] We also still relied on the old card catalog for index terms, since the online catalog records did not have all the access points the cards provided. Vice versa, you could not rely on the card catalog alone since it had not been updated for newer collections once we started creating online records. So here the situation was decent, but not as good as it could have been.

• The biggest problem was University Archives: [SLIDE 4] When our current University Archivist came on board at the beginning of 2007, she was rather surprised – to say the least – to discover that the primary access point to about 95% of UA was a lovely color­ coded card catalog that her immediate two predecessors had failed to automate in any way ­ despite the fact that discussions on how to do so dated back to the early to mid­ 1980s when the first Apple machine was acquired for the department. Everything staff had looked into prior to 2007 seemed to require substantial funding ( $ 100,000+) and that was simply not an option. So we had more or less gotten used to a rather antiquated and byzantine system, whose largest downside it was that all searching had to be done onsite. There were 7 collections that had at one point been deemed “notable” and records had been added to the online catalog (these included a collection that was about 95% news clippings about alumnus Perry Ellis, so not actually the most “notable” collections) and 4 finding aids added to VHP.

To summarize the challenge of the situation back in 2007: [SLIDE 5] • There was no single place researchers (or archivist for that matter!) could find all

collection descriptions. • They were 7­8 different types of card catalogs • There were binders holding finding aids with varying levels of detail for all Mss.

Collections and a few Archives Collections [SLIDE 6] • There were bibliographic records in the library's online catalog for Mss. Collections and a

handful of UA only • A small portion was also available as EAD finding aids as part of a multi­institution

cooperative project. • No electronic access to most of the University Archives.

Implementing Archon

After assessing this rather dismal situation, our University Archivist decided to halt all additions to the card catalog and began looking at open source collection management systems to implement in our repository and set up trials of both Archon and Archivist Toolkit. For a while we went back and forth between those two systems. In the end, what tipped the balance in favor of Archon was that Archivist Toolkit was behind in developing the staff interface and so when trying it we made only very halting progress entering data – in comparison to Archon.

Now I will outline our different experiences with Archon when it came to actually making it work for two very different situation like they presented themselves with our Archives and Manuscript Collections. (BTW – we currently use Archon 2.10 and are hoping to upgrade to version 2.22 over the summer.)

University Archives As I said, University Archives relied on a card catalog for access to the collections with a

few token box lists for major collections like the offices of the president and provost. In addition we had two Excel documents that were started some years back – one providing shelf locations and another one that listed some accession information, but unfortunately was mostly incomplete. After looking at these two documents we fairly quickly decided that importing either one into Archon was not going to do much good as there was no actual description in the main fields that would be needed (like creator/title etc.) and the little that was there did not follow any standards whatsoever.

As it turned out, the best source of information we actually had on our holdings were the handwritten accession sheets that were filed by originating office, format, and accession number. [SLIDE 7] In the past, each accessioning form had been transformed into multiple card catalog entries or references, and as such were typed and color­ coded ­ but the problem was that in the process some of the accessioning information that we would want to preserve for complete and meaningful database entries was left out. [SLIDE 8] I can assure you, that the system in place back than was rather confusing. [SLIDE 9] It took new staff a long time to be comfortable with the color­coded card system and it was easy to forget to search in all possible places when trying

to help a researcher with a question. And to make things worse, in different card catalogs, different colors meant different things – so it’s easy to see why we were so desperate for change.

So – once we decided that the handwritten accessioning forms were the best place to import the Archon data from, we knew we were looking at some substantial manual labor in the form of typing. [SLIDE 10] In the summer of 2007, we hired two graduate students (for total of 40 hours per week, the money coming from a vacant paraprofessional position) who had worked in the department in the past, had a good sense of humor and also very important, who did not have an aversion to data entry. Over the course of the summer, they entered records for about 90% of the University Archives collections. [SLIDE 11] These did not include box and folder lists, but did frequently include description to the series level. For those collections where we did have a paper inventory –any electronic versions were usually long gone ­ a student created a PDF, which is linked to from the record in Archon. Unfortunately, the PDFs are not searchable, but at least they are there linked to the Archon record. Subsequently, beginning in the fall of 2007, a couple work­study students diligently copied and pasted the inventories that were less than 20 pages long. Anything over 20 pages we are still leaving in PDF format for the time being. ­ but the plan is of course to have them fully entered into Archon – someday …and hopefully that will be soon..… [SLIDE 12] If more details is needed: Links to single PDF files (for shorter finding­aids) are entered into the URL field under “Other Information” and for multiple links we decided to paste them into the description field, which is more user­friendly…[SLIDE 13]

Manuscripts

Now we are going to look at how things worked out for the Manuscripts Collections which was a completely different scenario and at first seemed more straight forward, as we had several electronic sources that all in theory seemed good candidates for data import.

Before we tried to import the MARC and EAD documents it was suggested that we import the Manuscripts Accessions Database, which was in Access. The University Archivist at the time thought this would be a good idea because based on her previous experiences with Access as a collection management tool she thought that most required fields and a good level of standardized language would be more or less a given. It turns out this Access database was actually not all that great and caused quite a few headaches for us as the bad data would later sit in Archon taunting us. We really should have caught that shortcoming but got carried away a bit in our eagerness to get as much data into Archon as quickly as possible. Since the Access import in 2007, significant progress has been made in cleaning up this data (mostly with the help of a volunteer who spends 5 hours per week on this). [SLIDE 14] (Colonial Dames example – none of the ‘bad data’ is visible to the public as we chose the ‘do not display’ option for the batch)

Next, we were very hopeful to import the existing MARC records directly from our SIRSI online catalog into Archon. But again, we quite frankly did not have the IT support we needed ­ and when our IT person could not find the time to write a script to import the MARC records, we were not willing to wait for month, hoping that eventually he might get around to it. So instead we settled on having another student doing the copying and pasting for those. That

was also in the summer of 2007; And took about 2 1/2 months at 15 hours/week. On a more positive note: The later versions of Archon should make importing records and finding aids easier. PHP experience of IT staff is helpful.

As for importing the finding aids in EAD, we ultimately decided to simply insert a link to the Virginia Heritage URL as the most expedient solution. The link also display as “View Box List” [SLIDE 15] We had issues with the import function at the time and in our case the issues were on the Archon end as well as on the end of the EAD to be imported. As I understand it, the idiosyncrasies of how the mss finding aids were encoded created problems on top of the existing Archon issues – and that made it just more of a headache than it was worth. Much of the records for the mss collections could be copied and pasted in at least part from the library's catalog or existing EAD documents. Again, there are a shockingly small number of Word documents for recently created (last 10 years) finding aids here, so much of that copying and pasting will need to be done from the PDFs that were created of the hundreds of paper finding aids. [SLIDE 16] While most of the viable University Archives box lists were copied and pasted during the fall semester (2007), a similar effort for the Manuscripts collections is a multi­year long process in part because of the generally more complex nature of those finding aids and of course the greater quantity.

In short, we're doing a mix of things from brief records with no box list, copied and pasted box lists from PDF or Word documents, and many links to PDFs of box lists.

ARCHON’s overview of pros and cons from our perspective Pros Cons

Open source – no costs up front Open source – needs more in­house IT support and attention after implementation than proprietary

Can be customized to a degree to meet the needs of individual repositories

Needs in­house IT support (PHP and more) to be able to customize

[SLIDE 17] Integrates different archival functions into a single interface, hereby meeting a critical need in the archives and special collections world – works especially well for our new ‘Accessioning as Processing’ approach.

• Accessioning • Description • Location functionality • Digital object management

Cannot search by • call number (but can sort by) • by donor/source • finding aid author • some fields that many of us are

used to from MARC, like alternate title, added author, do not exist

Some – but not all ­ of these short coming could possibly be overcome with proper IT support.

User interface makes it easy for staff and student workers to enter data, both collection level and finding aids without the need of time­intensive encoding Going back later to enhance records is now as easy as editing a word document, but was very complicated in library online catalog SIRSI that made us upload into OCLC and corrections had to be channeled through Tech Services.

Web searchable [SLIDE 18] with better results than VHP Woolfolk example

• Woolfolk family (SCRC on 1 st page, 2 nd from bottom, VHS on second page middle

• Woolfolk papers (SCRC 2 nd , VHP 5 th

• Woolfolk family papers (SCRC 1 st , VHP 5 th )

whereas SIRSI is not

Researcher Module: shopping cart allows selection not only of collections, but also. series, box, folder and down to item level [SLIDE 19]

Can’t run stats (at least not without IT support behind the scenes)

ARCHON offers multiple outputs for data entered. Meaning records that were input using the simple web forms can be extracted both in MARC format and EAD!

Taking everything into account, our experience has not been without headaches and instances of exasperation. Some of these headaches we created for ourselves (like importing an Access database that was not sufficiently cleaned up) and others again could probably have been avoided had we had at least some more IT support than the very minimal help available to us at the time.

[SLIDE 20] So while there were these admitted bumps in the road, I think that everyone at our institution (including Flat Stanley) agrees that overall the implementation of ARCHON was a huge step forward for us. ARCHON flexibility and ease of use allowed us at to bring together our rather varied descriptive practices for manuscripts and university archives collections that had evolved over many years with a very reasonable budget of staffing and student time.

As a result, researchers have not only been able to search university archives collections outside of a card catalog in the reading room the first time. It is also the first time that more than a token number of manuscript collections and university archives collections and their respective finding­aids could be searched through the same interface – whether a database, online catalog, or card catalog. Collection descriptions ranging from brief records through very detailed finding aids have been made available for over 1,000 collections from this repository in the year since we launched Archon. [SLIDE 21] The ease of use of the staff interface and the immediate public access available through the web interface present opportunities worthy of note to repositories. We have been getting positive feed­back from researchers who either walk in with an ARCHON print­out and also from patrons who are using the database onsite and who like using it. And just a couple of week ago, our Dean received a Thank­You letter and a donation from a long time user/university employee who made a point in commenting on how much more user­friendly SCRC had become, praising particularly ARCHON’s shopping card function.

Plans for the next year or so [SLIDE 22]

• Upgrade ARCHON over the summer, in fact we will be taking two steps up from our current version.

• We will be working on getting the backlog into Archon as it is being described. • Over the summer, we are also planning on extracting MARC records from Archon into

our library catalog and EAD records into the Virginia Heritage database. We have tested these functions already other than a bit of tweaking for one or two fields they run smoothly.

• Start using the digital objects module, which is currently disabled; we have seen it used at other institutions. Right now we have an image database in Access – but it needs some cleaning up before we can import it, don’t want to repeat the mistake we made with the Mss. Accessions database.

But for the longer term (5 + years), we are of course open to migrating other systems as well, if we think it makes sense. But for us, in 2007, ARCHON seemed to make the most sense, since we could not simply migrate but had to create online records to a large part from cars, acc. sheets and binders. I hope I was able to bring across what made ARCHON such a great tool for our

institution and gave you some useful information to help you in your decision­making process. uxs 4/14/2009