|Lesson:||Lesson 1: Introduction to Processing|
|Topic:||Lesson 1 Introduction|
Lesson 1: Introduction to Processing
After acquiring records, dividing them into appropriate groups, and accessioning them, you have gained a minimal amount of physical and intellectual control over them--you know something about what the records are and you know where they are located.
However, archival collections usually require more work to make them understandable and usable for your audience. Simply telling a user that there are 10 boxes of minutes or five containers of photographs isn’t enough information. Your users need to know how the records are organized, where they came from, and how to locate the exact information they need to look at. This work is called processing. Processing gets the records ready for people to use them and helps protect and preserve them.
There are three tasks involved in processing an archival collection of records:
These three tasks will help you
This course will cover each of these tasks. We’re going to start by looking at each task individually, then in Lesson 5 we’ll look at a case study to see how the tasks fit together.