Happy New Year! This week I started back at the Wellington City Archive following the Christmas break. My focus this week is on the back of house procedures. Many of the requests for records are for information and plans for buildings in the greater Wellington area. Because of the high risk nature of allowing plans to be viewed in their original format, the Archive has a policy of scanning any building plans in advance of the customer's appointment. This is one reason for the 24 hour waiting period. This cushion of time allows the technical staff to pull the desired record and scan it into a file with the customer's ID number so that they can look through the plans without folding or refolding them, causing damage to the sometimes very fragile plans. This also allows the front desk staff to provide the customer with copies of specific plans so that they have something to take with them to refer to outside the Archive.
I also had the opportunity to become more familiar with the stacks in the Archive. This was especially pleasant in light of the high humity and moderately high temperatures outside. The Archive is kept air conditioned to help in preservation, making my time there quite pleasant!:D
The archive standard reads, "Requirement 26: Inactive records of archival value must be stored in conditions where the relative humidity is never above 60% or below 30%. (Applies to inactive records of archival value, and archives)" (Continuum, 2007).
I was tasked with returning items to their usual locations within the stacks. This is much like reshelving in a public library with the added benefit that the items are kept in a very strict order and will not be removed or replaced by any customer browsing the stacks. There are some items that are incorrectly labled of course. This is the result of having different items join the collection at different times. These items are promptly dealt with and returned to their usual location. The Archive is not terribly busy at this time of year but there were quite a number of items to be returned to the stacks. I can only imagine that during busier time of year the process of returning items to the stacks becomes a critical task.
My final task of the day was to be trained in the long term preservation of the outsized roll collection. Each roll of documents must be unrolled and straightened as much as possible. They are covered with protective material and rolled around a paper tube to prevent damage associated with tightly rolled documents. This is an exact process and can take as long as a half an hour per roll depending on the fragility of the documents. Sometimes it requires more than one person to ensure that the documents are not damaged. This is a long term project for the Archive but progress is being made in the preservation of these valuable records.
Archives New Zealand. (2007) Storage Standard. Continuum Resource Kit. Retrieved from http://continuum.archives.govt.nz/recordkeeping-publications.html on 11 January 2011.
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