adj.of an archival resource, prepared for useDesnoyers 1982, 23When is a collection processed? When the archivist has selected from the processing continua and applied the appropriate degree of arrangement, preservation, description, and screening activities that will make that collection usable for the researcher while protecting the physical well-being of the material and honoring donor and legal restrictions on the collection.Hackbart-Dean and Slomba 2009, 10According to Slotkin and Lynch’s article, “An Analysis of Processing Procedures,” a collection is “processed” whenever it can be used productively for research. In practice, manuscript and archives processors have developed different definitions for “fully processed,” “minimally processed,” or “unprocessed” collections.Coyner and Pringle 2014, 474Despite the working group’s efforts to provide a basic set of definitions with the survey, issues of miscommunication remained. Some institutions felt differently about the makeup of a processed collection: one representative argued that having an accession record online constituted a processed and accessible collection, while others argued that a baseline level of arrangement and description should be necessary for a collection to qualify as processed. Still others remarked that their legacy finding aids were so difficult to navigate that they were hesitant to call those collections processed.of photographic film, having the latent image made visibleAvedon and DeVilliers 1979, 102To summarize, the permanence of silver halide film depends not only on using film that is capable of meeting archival requirements but also on the manner in which it is processed and stored. The first two factors depend on the laboratory doing the filming and processing; however, the storage conditions depend on the user.McCann 2017, 166To speed up the development of gelatin silver photographs, news agency and newspaper photographers sometimes chose not to fully process the images, resulting in “improperly processed” prints (see Figure 1).
Notes
Archivists disagree on criteria for determining whether an archival resource is processed or not.
