Middle of the night ramblings

[majesticzaichik]

First have to preface this by apologizing for the grammar, im on the cellphone and there isnt an autocorrect function while on LJ

Comments

[lyssa027]

If my Justin falls asleep after me, I can sleep pretty well, but if he goes to bed before me for some reason, his snoring, sounds, and thrashing prevent from from falling asleep as well

[majesticzaichik]

Yeah, I prefer to avoid situations like that at home, which is why I've always been happy to have separate bedrooms. Also that way, he can keep his room as dirty and cluttered as he likes it : ). I've been described as "Spartan" before lol.

[peterb]

I thought the gag with sucessful archiving was being able to pick the peanuts from the metaphorical turd? Otherwise you end up with everything, and people in the future doing research will spend an age sorting the wheat from the chaff?

Not that identifying items as being in one camp or the other is the easiest thing, and there will almost certainly be some items which could be of great significance that got deep sixed, but some winnowing is required....

Disclaimer: I am not an archivist. I do work with some though.

[majesticzaichik]

There are a few thing you can do to separate the wheat from the chaff in archives. I think it's actually less of a problem to separate the wheat from the chaff than it is a burden on space. In my current collection I'm working on, I've separated the enormous piles of receipts from the valuable part of the collection. This is not so hard, what is hard is dealing with the 50 boxes of receipts that was left after sorting through it all. Many Archives have space limitations with no easy way to rectify the problem. The ideal thing to do would be to negotiate with the donor as to which part of the collection the Archives would want (ie. NOT the 50 boxes of receipts), but I have never been that high up the totem pole to actually deal with donor relations. To me there is a fine balance between negotiating what you don't want, and the donor potentially becoming upset that the Archives doesn't want the 50 boxes of receipts and then pulling the whole deal. I guess my supervisor has dealt with it by just taking everything and piling the Archives