With a clear retention schedule, retention policy, and collection policy in hand, and ideal storage located, your archives committee—under the supervision of your consulting archivist—can begin work on the arrangement and description (also known as processing) of the perpetuity records you are collecting for your archives. Within each department, you will refine the arrangement of materials to be prepared for the archives, re-house material, and create a listing to facilitate future access by staff and other researchers.
While material that comes to your company archives from various departments may be in somewhat orderly arrangement, documents that arrive from closing productions and/or load-outs often need to undergo substantial reordering. Stage managers, general managers, and other workers use documents for different purposes and retain and reorder the documents to serve necessary ends (e.g., pulling contracts or invoices, consulting past correspondence, etc.). Maintaining the integrity of original order in conjunction with future accessibility can be contradictory. You may be forced to rearrange documents to aid access using terms and definitions understandable to your company staff (which may or may not be used by the archives profession). Be aware of how documents are used prior to arriving in the archives and exercise common sense in creating order and arrangement.
For example, a set of stage manager reports may have been consulted by a general manager. The order of the reports might have been altered to highlight important nights, trouble areas, etc. This same set of documents might then be passed to the assistant of the general manager, who is asked to reorder the documents looking for a specific cast member. The documents are then passed by the assistant to an intern who is charged with the task of isolating matinee performances from the run to calculate house totals. Do you see where this is leading? By the time the archives receives the documents, they have been reordered numerous times. Maintaining the reports in this unordered state will lead to confusion. In this instance, a reordering using date chronology would be practical to ensure future accessibility.
This isn’t to say that all documents will need to be, or should be reordered. Often documents arrive directly from the person who created them (perhaps the stage manager) and should be kept in this original order. But in many instances the documents arrive in a less organized/less original order and should be rearranged in favor of accessibility. Frequently, multiple copies of the same document are found within departmental and individual staff files. By developing policies on how duplicates are handled, your archives committee can eliminate unnecessary material and free up valuable shelf space.
Once you’ve sufficiently arranged perpetuity records that have arrived in your archives—balancing original order and accessibility—it’s time to begin the process of description. Series, or grouping of records with the same provenance, will be identified and numbered, (usually according to a hierarchical arrangement based on the company’s organizational chart), and further subdivided into subseries. For example:
City Theatre Records
Series I. Artistic Director’s Records
Correspondence [subseries]
Subject Files [subseries]
Here records from the artistic director’s office include files of correspondence and another run of files relating to topical subjects; these form the subseries within Series I. Artistic Director’s Records. The correspondence files (which, for the purposes of this example, are arranged alphabetically by correspondent) would be reviewed to clarify names and order, and, if staff resources permit, correspondence within folders would be arranged in chronological order; a similar process would be undertaken for the subject files. Inclusive dates of the material within the folders would be written on the folder label. A standardized folder labeling system should be adopted. For example:
City Theatre Records
Series I. Artistic Director’s Records (John Smith) Correspondence Abbott, Helen
Box 1, folder 1 1985-1996
When you place material in boxes, affix a box label containing information regarding the contents of each box, as well as an assigned box number.
Create a listing or inventory of the records that reflects the arrangement of the records and includes the box and folder number numbers to enable physical access to specific records (see Appendix E — Sample Archival Inventories). A similar database as that used for lifespan documents can also be used for inventorying your collection of archival materials. Software can be purchased for this purpose, but there are templates that have been designed by established archives that can be used through open-source sharing (see www.collectiveaccess.org for templates created by Brooklyn Academy of Music and Roundabout Theatre Company). These open-source templates can be installed and managed by in-house IT staff. For those companies without IT staff, common office software can be used to create archival inventories that can be shared online with staff and potential outside users.
Assistance with arranging and describing company archives can be obtained in several ways. A consulting professional archivist may be able to train and supervise your staff in basic archival processing for a nominal fee or even tickets to your shows (barter). Consider establishing a student internship through local university graduate archival and/or theatre programs. If you participate in the ATAP Initiation Program, your ATAP archivist and/or documentarian may be affiliated with or have colleagues in these programs. Also, your company may have volunteers such as ushers who are very knowledgeable about the company’s history and can perform basic processing tasks such as sorting and arranging material alphabetically or by date. Although establishing and maintaining your theatre’s archives is a long-term commitment that can at times seem overwhelming, when broken into discrete projects, it’s actually very doable. And don’t forget to apply the creativity with which you tackle your theatrical work to your archives—simple solutions and resources are often very near when you think outside of the box.
ARRANGEMENT & DESCRIPTION
- Use common sense to balance concerns of original order and accessibility as you collect and arrange records for the archives.
- Establish a clear and consistent method to label and describe the records in your archives.
- Whether a spreadsheet or a database, create an inventory of your archives that matches your description protocols.
- Enlist students and volunteers to help with discrete processing tasks.