This week, I was again
educated on an interesting term used in archival spheres via Terry Cook’s What
is Past is Prologue and through class discussion. The term, “intellectual
processing,” is used when an archivist configures mentally how items were organized
in the archive before it was physically removed/placed in another space due to
context, interrelationships, functionality, and other means related to the
content of the record.[1] Not having very much
archival experience aside from the occasional in-person research trip (much
more common pre-COVID-19), I speculate that this strategy can be very helpful
when an archivist might need to remove an item from a folder or another object
for a variety of reasons, but they can still recollect where that item is meant
to be or can be repositioned if necessary. Now that I currently work as a researcher
for the JDP, I might even come across this process here as I learn more about what the JDP has in store for me as an Inclusive History Researcher and as they continue to open their archive up to the public. I would also think that intellectual processing
could be a way to prevent or track theft that may occur in an archive, which as
I had mentioned in my “Archives and Manuscripts” course this Tuesday is something that can happen within a myriad of archives and repositories.
On opening more research opportunities to the public, the discussion which my
classmates and I had about making research items accessible to the public was
an extremely insightful one, as it is arguably a universal notion (for many
researchers) to want to navigate through and understand an archive (whether in
physical or digital format) with ease. For instance, elaborating more on a picture
found on a digital platform can be helpful for a researcher who may be on a
time crunch in the archive and who only wants to view pictures extremely
relevant to their research. By further detailing this photograph, the archive
can help researchers pinpoint what they can potentially use in future research.
The same strategy can be used for documents and other items available at an
archive.
[1] Terry
Cook, “What’s Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the
Future Paradigm Shift,” http://www.mybestdocs.com/cookt-pastprologue-ar43fnl.htm (Links
to an external site.) (originally in Archivaria, spring
1997).
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