MH

GregoryS.Hunter_2020_5.AcquisitionsandAcce_DevelopingandMaintain

Acquisitions

  • Purpose: An acquisition is more than adding items; it expands holdings and requires legal, physical, and intellectual control over the collection. In the US, acquisitions also involve considering materials not generated by the parent institution (e.g., historical societies, university special collections). Acquisitions should align with a collections policy approved at the highest level to build a unified collection serving multiple publics.
  • Two major topics in this chapter:
    • Acquisition of records and papers not generated by the parent institution
    • Accessioning records or papers to establish control, regardless of source
  • Audiovisual and digital records are addressed at the end of the chapter to apply acquisition and accessioning practices to those media.
  • Reality of acquisitions: an acquisition adds to holdings; it has two elements: physical custody and legal title.
  • Physical custody: possession of the records. Usually shifts from creator/recipient to the archives, but in the digital environment some archives use noncustodial approaches (assisting agencies with long-term preservation without transferring records).
  • Legal title: ownership of the records; includes physical property and intellectual property (copyright). Archives must avoid infringing owners’ rights and transfers of title must be explicit, not presumed.
  • The transfer of both physical and intellectual property is necessary for complete ownership; documentary transfer instruments are used to formalize transfers.
  • Five bases for acquisitions (to justify acquisition):
    • 5. Statute: Legislation empowering agencies to acquire records (e.g., Federal Records Act in the US).
    • 5. Administrative regulation: Regulations empowering agencies to acquire records, issued by executive branch or independent regulatory agencies.
    • 5. Records retention schedule: Lists of all record series with retention periods; permanent records may be transferred to an archives.
    • 5. Permissive policy statement: Policy authorizing the archives to acquire organizational records and possibly other materials.
    • 5. Acquisition policy approved by the governing body: A formal policy to guide systematic acquiring.
  • Context examples mentioned:
    • After elections, civil servants may sift through past records (illustrative anecdote involving Canadian officials).
    • Federal and provincial examples of retention schedules and policy usage.
  • Three methods of acquisition (relationship to custody and title) (see Fig. 5.1):
    • 3. Transfer within agency or institution: physical custody typically transfers; ownership (dominion) usually remains with the parent institution; transfer of title often does not occur.
    • 3. Purchase: transfer of both physical custody and legal title for financial consideration.
    • 3. Gift: transfer of both physical custody and legal title without financial consideration.
  • Transfer within agency or institution specifics:
    • Physical custody changes as archives take possession; ownership remains with the parent institution (dominion).
    • In archives vs. records center: archives are bound by access policies; records centers are mainly custodial and do not control use by researchers; records centers extend the department’s filing system rather than serve as scholarly resources.
  • Purchases and gifts specifics:
    • Both involve transfer of title as well as custody.
    • Purchase considerations: legitimacy of seller; if seller lacks clear title, archives may face future claims and be forced to return items.
    • Gifts considerations: three characteristics—clear offer, acceptance, and delivery; deed of gift is used to document these elements and transfer of both physical and intellectual property.
    • Caution against fraud in autograph/ manuscript markets; examples include famous dubious items (e.g., Hitler diaries as a cautionary tale).
  • Gift program implications:
    • Soliciting manuscript gifts requires balance: be interested but not obtrusive; avoid overbearing approaches; staff with strong interpersonal skills help but are not enough alone.
    • Repositories should maintain outreach through social media, speeches, press, brochures, and a web presence; maintain lead files with correspondence, notes of conversations, and field reports.
    • Donation tax questions historically involved deductions for creators; the Tax Reform Act of 1969 changed deduction rules: donors’ deductions depend on whether donated items are capital assets for the donor; typically deductions cover out-of-pocket costs for creation materials, not the value of the creator’s work.
    • IRS requires donors of property valued over 5{,}000 to obtain a qualified appraisal; the archives should refer appraisal questions to professional appraisers or professional associations to avoid conflicts of interest.
  • Developing an Acquisition Policy:
    • An acquisition policy defines the collection’s scope and the subjects and formats to be collected; without focus, risks include lack of internal unity, insufficient critical mass, wasted resources, and competition among repositories.
    • Policy should balance definition with flexibility to grow and evolve.
    • Brichford’s five ideals for acquisition policy:
    • 5. Extend research strengths, interests, and needs logically.
    • 5. Anticipate future research needs.
    • 5. Support extensive holdings of published/unpublished materials.
    • 5. Show a high ratio of use to volume and processing costs (high research value).
    • 5. Avoid direct competition with another major collector in the same region.
    • Drafting the policy:
    • Involve staff, administrators, researchers, donors, volunteers; governing body approves.
    • Use questions to guide decisions about resources: budget, space, staff capabilities, patron base, formats, collecting themes.
    • Consider formats beyond paper (photographic media, magnetic tapes, film, digital media) and storage/handling requirements.
    • Example case: North Fork University (NFU) acquires a policy focusing on the environment and social welfare, and collaborates regionally to avoid duplication; materials may be acquired by gift, bequest, purchase, or other transfer; deaccessioning allowed with Director approval if irrelevance, space, duplication, or irreparable condition occurs.
    • NFU acquisition policy (Fig. 5.2): focuses on regional environmental topics and social welfare; cooperative regional gathering; deaccessioning under director approval; lists areas of collecting (environment, social welfare) and types of materials; notes space and preservation considerations.
    • Example worksheet (Fig. 5.3) used to evaluate potential acquisitions against policy: lists collection title, description, and acquisition notes; demonstrates decisions about fit with policy (e.g., Peconic Bay Yachting Association fits; environmental coalition items fit with regional focus; items tangentially related to environment or outside policy do not fit).
  • Cooperative Collecting and Documentation Strategies:
    • NFU recognizes it cannot document the North Fork alone; cooperative collecting minimizes wasteful competition and ensures a defined share of the historical record.
    • Documentation strategy concept challenges: focus on documenting society rather than merely collecting existing records; aims to document priority topics in collaboration with various stakeholders.
    • The Sleeper syndrome (Woody Allen) warns that overemphasizing preserved artifacts can produce a biased or incomplete historical narrative; advocates for a more active role in shaping the historical record.
    • Richard J. Cox’s practical five-step model for local documentation:
    • 5 steps: assemble advisory group and conduct preliminary review; evaluate documentation quality of major aspects; prepare a priority-action report; establish working groups for documenting priority topics; continue improving documentation.
    • Hackman’s retrospective: documentation strategies energized archival planning but direct implementation often lagged; the enduring value is in reframing archival scope toward documenting broader societal processes.
    • The 2014 article by Soyka and Wilczek on documenting the American military experience in Iraq/Afghanistan highlights modern challenges: asymmetrical warfare, big data, informal records, and active-record management; emphasizes five metadata types: provenance, reference, fixity, context, and access rights.
    • The overall message: documentation strategies can energize archivists to engage communities and embed archives in ongoing life, though practical application can be uneven.
  • Documentation and documentation-driven challenges: the idea of documenting and documenting strategies continues to influence archival practice even if full implementation proves difficult.
  • Modern examples and debates: post-9/11 military documentation issues; evolving metadata requirements for born-digital records; ongoing conversation about the balance between collecting and documenting.

Accessioning

  • Accessioning is the act and procedures of transferring legal title and taking records/papers into the physical custody of an archival agency or manuscript repository.
  • Goals of accessioning: establish legal, physical, and intellectual control over a collection.
  • Legal control concerns: includes both the medium (physical custody and transfer) and the message (copyright and intellectual property). The objective is to document the transfer of both physical and intellectual aspects clearly and unambiguously.
  • Six transfer instruments used to document legal control (i.e., to transfer title and/or custody):
    • 6. Oral agreement
    • 6. Purchase agreement
    • 6. Letter
    • 6. Will
    • 6. Deposit agreement
    • 6. Deed of gift agreement (or contract)
  • Details on each instrument:
    • Oral Agreement: legally binding but offers the poorest documentation; risky if challenged in the future; archives should avoid oral agreements whenever possible and rely on written instruments.
    • Purchase Agreement: transfer of title via financial consideration; requires legal review to protect repository; ensure seller has clear title; risk of acquiring items with contested ownership.
    • Letter: documents donor-archive transfer but often lacks detail; may not address copyright, access restrictions, duplicates, or disposal of duplicates; risk of ambiguity.
    • Will: transfer of title after the donor’s death; may involve a lawyer; donors may indicate that a repository’s gift is anticipated; archives may refuse if the collection does not relate to current holdings or if access restrictions are unacceptable.
    • Deposit Agreement: place records in custody without transfer of title; dates to pass are usually unspecified; risk of donors changing their mind or failing to donate; possible tax considerations incentivizing deposits; questions to answer in the agreement include insurance, responsibility for damage, permitted access, and reimbursement if records are removed before title transfer.
    • Deed of Gift Agreement: a signed contract governing the transfer of title and any restrictions on access or use; recommended as a standard form; reviewed by legal counsel to ensure clarity and avoid future disputes; elements typically include donor information; donor’s legal ownership; donation intent and actual transfer; description of records; rights transferred; restrictions; conditions on reformatting or duplication; disposal of duplicates; display terms; signatures and dates.
  • Practical implications of a deed of gift:
    • A standard deed of gift helps reassure donors and provides a consistent framework for administering donations; failure to meet obligations could void the contract and allow reclamation or damages.
  • Physical control after title transfer:
    • Shipping arrangements: best is for staff to pick up and transport locally; for larger collections, use reputable freight or moving companies; pack carefully to preserve original order and prepare a packing list; avoid temperature fluctuations that could damage fragile materials (e.g., photographs)
    • Receiving the collection: document the transfer with an acknowledgment; for gifts, a thank-you letter from the staff member with the most donor contact is the minimum; for important collections, a letter from the head of the repository is appropriate.
    • Accessioning: place the collection on the repository’s loading dock or desk and determine where to store it; begin intellectual control with an accession form; this form marks the start of the archival description process.
  • Intellectual control
    • Accession records serve as the first step in intellectual control.
    • Benefits of accession records:
    • Inventory control over total holdings by noting each collection’s location
    • Temporary finding aids while fuller arrangement/description is underway
    • Worksheets that guide archival activities and establish processing priorities
    • Accessions can be stored manually or in a database; a database-based accession system is preferred for searchability and updating as collections grow.
    • Required content for an accession form/log:
    • accession number
    • record group number and name
    • title of collection
    • donor name and address
    • date of receipt
    • description of collection (approximate volume, inclusive dates, general subject matter)
    • restrictions notes
    • temporary location
    • preliminary processing plans (major divisions, arrangement/description, staffing needs, preservation considerations)
  • The accession record is the first component of an intellectual control system and, in the short term, acts as the primary finding aid until full processing is completed.

Audiovisual and Digital Records

  • Core principles apply to audiovisual and digital records as to other materials, but there are medium-specific considerations:
    • Engage with the creator to understand the nature of the records and potential uses; document legal considerations in a deed of gift agreement; ensure adequate storage space for accessioned records.
  • Audiovisual records specifics:
    • Ongoing conversations with donors are essential to understand the systems used to create the audiovisual materials and potential uses of the records; these can change over time.
    • Documentation should include media types and quantities to inform future digitization or format migration decisions.
    • The deed of gift should address copyright in depth; audiovisual materials are often candidates for reuse and repurposing (documentary projects, social media posts, etc.); ownership of intellectual property should be clarified.
    • Storage conditions are critical to preserve fragile media; environmental controls are essential.
  • NFU example for audiovisuals:
    • NFU’s two acquisition priorities are the environment and social welfare (documenting the impact of environmental changes on industries and documenting life of migrant workers).
    • The NFU department received many home videos; decided to accession a representative subset to document changes to family life over time, avoiding being overwhelmed by personal home videos.
  • Digital records:
    • Archives have been accessioning digital records since the 1960s; large institutions led early work; now, archives of all sizes deal with significant digital content.
    • The personal digital archiving practices of writers (Becker & Nogues 2012) highlighted poorly managed digital manuscripts; projects like digitization of Lucille Ball archives show digitization trends in museums and centers (e.g., Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz Museum project).
    • Web archiving: Brown (2006) identified four methods of transferring web content to an archive: direct transfer, remote harvesting, database archiving, transactional archiving; these are summarized in Fig. 5.4.
    • Social media records (e.g., Twitter) from events like the Arab Spring require capturing five types of metadata: provenance, reference, fixity, context, and access rights to ensure robust preservation.
  • Practical considerations for digital records acquisitions (informed by SAA Trends in Archives Practice):
    • Policies and procedures should be in place before acquiring digital records: collection development policies aligned with resources; predeposit guidelines; transfer guidelines; storage/management procedures; access policies.
    • Physical custody for digital records involves several transfer methods: direct transfer via physical media (CDs, DVDs, USB drives, external hard drives) or online tools (FTP, Dropbox); direct capture from donor’s computer; capture from donor-hosted servers or websites.
    • Virus scanning is essential on receipt; transfer should be moved to sustainable formats immediately; disk imaging is preferred to capture bit-by-bit copies and preserve metadata; checksums should be generated to verify integrity over time.
    • Working copies are created for analysis without disturbing original metadata; file-type and last-modified data help identify duplicates and guide processing plans.
    • Sustainability in digital acquisitions: key questions include scope of collecting, significant content properties to preserve, decisions about format normalization, and storage/access cost planning.
    • Collecting born-digital materials requires coordination with creators and colleagues; build trust, discuss privacy and copyright, and plan for ongoing management.
    • Documentation of digital acquisitions includes addressing exclusivity, unknown content, retention/disposal, permission to copy, encrypted data, and access limitations.
    • Validation and ingest strategies (Erin Faulder) emphasize either simple validation (count files against transfer list) or advanced validation (compute/check checksums and compare to originator values); regardless of strategy, initial virus scanning and quarantine are standard practices.
    • Ingest workflows (Faulder’s appendices) cover file format identification, validation, metadata extraction, PII identification, duplicate detection, format normalization, and integration into the archival finding aid.
  • Practical guidance from the Trends in Archives Practice modules (2013–2016) emphasizes alignment of born-digital collection development with resources, building relationships with creators, and ensuring robust metadata to facilitate access and reuse.
  • Conclusion for digital and audiovisual records: Acquiring and accessioning digital and audiovisual materials requires careful planning, ongoing collaboration with creators, and a strong emphasis on preservation-friendly formats, authentic transfers, and comprehensive metadata to ensure long-term access.

Conclusion

  • To fulfill its mandate, an archives or manuscript repository must be focused and organized.
  • Focus comes from a mission statement and an acquisition policy.
  • Organizational strength comes from establishing legal, physical, and intellectual control over the materials added to the archives.
  • With these controls in place, an archives can preserve and make available records of enduring value and direct its energies toward serving researchers and the public.

Notes (key references and concepts)

  • Legal control encompasses both physical custody and intellectual property; ownership of the message relates to copyright and reproduction rights.
  • Transfers of both physical and intellectual property should be explicit and well-documented to avoid future disputes.
  • The five bases for acquisitions provide the legal and policy framework that justifies and guides collecting activities.
  • The distinction between transfers within an agency (dominion) and ownership transfer to an archive is central to understanding custody and title.
  • Deed of gift agreements are the preferred instrument for documenting gifts and should be reviewed by legal counsel to ensure clarity and enforceability.
  • Physical custody and shipping arrangements require careful attention to handling, packing, and environmental controls to protect materials.
  • Intellectual control begins with accessioning and forms the basis for later arrangement, description, and access.
  • Audiovisual and digital records require additional considerations (technology changes, copyright, storage, format migration, and metadata) that differ from traditional paper records.
  • Documentation strategies emphasize community involvement and a broader view of history, rather than merely collecting existing artifacts; this approach has both practical benefits and challenges in implementation.
  • Modern digital practices stress the importance of preplanning, collaboration with creators, secure transfer, virus protection, format sustainability, and robust metadata for long-term access.
  • The material emphasizes ethical, legal, and practical implications, including donor relations, privacy concerns, tax considerations, and the need for professional standards in appraisal and transfer documentation.