Watching a documentary on the Library of Congress, I learned they have a full-time staff of 12 just to repair and rebind their collection.

Found that stat in a PBS special last night, and it made me wonder, for those who do institutional work, what's the biggest single project you've ever taken on?

3 comments

3 Comments

walker.hayden4mo ago

Our local archive once spent three years just cataloging a single donor's lifetime of postcards.

amy_sanchez2mo ago

Does that mean they were just the postcards, or did the collection include the donor's letters and personal notes too? @walker.hayden, our museum's archive lucked out with a similar hoard from a local historian, but we tackled it by sorting all 10,000 postcards by decade first (which was brutal but worth it). The trick was breaking it into phases: two years for the 19th century stuff (all those faded ink scrawls took forever to transcribe), then one year for the rest. I swear, the handwritten dates are what kill you, like some people just wrote "Tuesday" and left you guessing for months.

black.mark4mo ago

Okay, "cataloging" might be a bit off. I mean, they were probably processing the whole collection. That's way more than just typing up a list. You've got to sort them, figure out the dates and places, put them in acid-free folders, maybe scan some. A big postcard collection could have thousands of items, all mixed up. So three years for one person's life work? That actually sounds right, idk.