Collection Processing

Overview

The Shelby White & Leon Levy Archival Processing Laboratory is a space for the arrangement and description of the Partners' archival collections and the home of the Archival Services Department. The staff consists of four full-time archivists and a manager. All hold at least a Masters-level degree in archival science, and department language proficiencies include German, Hebrew, Russian, French, and Yiddish. The staff arranges and describes archival collections that are processing or reprocessing priorities for the five Partner organizations, and also provides a wide range of other services to the Partners.

The department arranges and describes archival collections for the five Partner organizations. Since 2001, archival services has made accessible hundreds of collections, totaling thousands of linear feet of material. The department's processing approach aligns both with contemporary professional standards and individual Partner practices, and staff works closely with Partner archivists to make arrangement and description decisions. Preservation concerns in the collections are addressed, as resources allow, or communicated to the Partners for future consideration. DACS-compliant EAD-encoded finding aids are created for the collections, which are then ingested into the Center's digital asset management system Digitool. The finding aids can be found via Primo, the Center's discovery layer, located at http://search.cjh.org, as well as by search engines such as Google. The department's practices are documented in a processing manual.