ACDA Archives Interim Report - October 2010 - NARA Grant Update

Objectives and Project Activities:
Progress continues on the basic project grant awarded to the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA).  We lost one of our interns in August 2010 to a fulltime job, but, with the help of an extension until December 31, 2010, we continue to work towards our objectives.  It is difficult to make as much progress with only one intern, but even with this cutback in personnel, we have managed to arrange all 18 collections and we are currently describing our 12th collection. 

Goals:
Goals have been met to varying degrees.  Most are a work-in-progress and will not be completed until the end of the grant period or possibly later.  Those scheduled for after the closing of the grant date are due to events that will happen in 2011.

Consultant:  The preservation specialist and the project archivist met in late August to go over her portion of the grant.  We discussed and agreed upon the areas of the archives in need of a phased preservation plan and how the needs should be addressed over an extended period of time.  We also discussed the creation of operating procedures that will ensure basic preservation such as refoldering and reboxing in acid-free folders.  Last, we discussed a business plan that would detail where collections should go in the event that the archives should fail.  The specialist has not turned these reports in yet.

MARC records : As the findings aids for each collection are produced using Archivists Toolkit, collection level MARC records are being generated.  The project archivist has arranged for the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC) to house these records and make them available through OCLC.  We have not yet begun to send the MARC records to NUCMC.

EAD finding aids:  EAD finding aids have been created for twelve collections.  We have found the EAD finding aids produced by Archivists Toolkit to be clumsy, difficult to use, and to have a non-editable choice of fields that are included in the reports.  We have found a report generator that will allow us to manipulate the reports and construct a useful end result.  We are currently learning to create the reports.  Once the reports are generated, they wil be uploaded to the archives website and their use promoted.  We have three large collections left to describe and the three very small ones that will not take much time to process.

Promotion: We are not yet at the point of actively promoting the finding aids.  Once they are on the website, we will place announcements on the ACDA website, on ChoralNet, the country’s largest forum for choir directors, on the SAA performing arts listserv, theSingerLink.com, and on the SingerNetwork.org.  A presentation was made in Spring 2010 to an archives class at the University of Oklahoma.  Another presentation will be made at the American Choral Directors Association National Conference in March 2011 and a second presentation will be made at the Midwest Archivists Conference in St. Paul in April 2011.

Assessment:
The goals of the original proposal remain realistic.  Losing an intern has made the process slower and more difficult but we hope to still accomplish our stated objectives by the end of the grant period.  The exception will be a presentation to be made in March 2011 at the ACDA National Conference and a presentation at the MAC Conference in St. Paul in April 2011.  The organization continues to be satisfied with the results.  Thanks to the organization of the records and the completed finding aids, reference work has become much quicker.  We are disappointed in the quality of Archivists Toolkit’s finding aid output.  It is confusing to read and contains much useless information, from our perspective.   We have chosen another report generator that allows us the necessary manipulation of fields and it should solve our problem.

Impact:
The completion of the finding aids and the organization of the records, regardless of the availability of searchable records, is impacting our ability to research reference questions in a highly positive fashion; we spend less time searching for answers.  Once the finding aids are available online, we anticipate that even more time could be saved as researchers receive the ability to work independently of the archivist.  With the inclusion of our records in the NUCMC catalog, we also anticipate more use, and based on presentations the ACDA archivist has heard, we also expect our reference volume to rise as our finding aids become widely available online.
Being able to undertake this project has been a dream-come-true for the ACDA archives.  For many years, the organization has talked about the day anyone could search our holdings online now it is becoming a reality.  For this, we are very grateful.