The Senate record group
contains eight series:

Appraise collection--detailed assessment
When the student assistants arrived in early September, we began a detailed collection appraisal. First, we appraised the earlier and smaller record groups, starting with Mitchell's family papers, his work as a campaign aide for Senator Edmund Muskie, Mitchell's own campaign for governor of Maine, his work for the Democratic Party, and his tenure as a federal attorney and judge. After appraising these record groups we started work on the senatorial files, which make up over 95% of the collection.

We decided to work on the personal records and office administration records first because these records contained information on the organization of Mitchell's senate office. With the knowledge gained from those series, along with the preliminary work of Mitchell's senate archivist, Kristi Mashon, we began processing the legislative series. The legislative series is the heart of senate collection taking up half of the volume of the senate collection. The material in the other senate series stems from the work in the legislative series. While working on the legislative series we have also been working on the memorabilia series, focusing particularly on the photographs.

Because of our preliminary appraisal work we were able to identify all the boxes belonging to a particular series and pull the boxes into one room for appraisal and arrangement. Once the boxes were laid out we subdivided the boxes into smaller groups by consulting the database created during the initial appraisal and more carefully examining the contents of the boxes.

For example, when we examined the the Personal series within the Senate record series, which contained over sixty boxes, we were able to separate most of these series into smaller divisions by material type. This allowed us to quickly identify the different material types and separate them into smaller divisions. The legislative health care series was loosely arranged by subject instead of material type and therefore more difficult to break down into smaller groups.

More information on organization.

Arrangement and organization
While arranging the collection we try to keep a proper balance between maintaining orginal order and arranging the collection for accessibility. A substantial portion of collection material was sent to remote storage as it became obsolete over the course of Mitchell's senate tenure. As a result, the way the material was arranged in the boxes when we received them during Phase I illustrated more how the material was arranged when it was put in boxes and shipped to Maine, than how these materials were arranged and used when they were in Mitchell's senate office. Therefore we often try to recreate how these files were arranged in the office without spending too much time arranging the material and slowing down our project. Usually we do not try to rearrange sections of the collection that have no evidence of systematic arrangement. Instead, we organize the section into smaller components (if possible) and then carefully describe its contents. We say that these series are arranged by subject.

Box of collection material in background when we received it.
Box in foreground has been
reboxed and refoldered.

Rebox, and refolder material.
As we appraise the collection, student assistants are refoldering and reboxing the material already appraised and arranged. When material is transferred to a new box, we assign a new catalog and box number to it.

More information on Minaret and creating on-line finding aid.

Write standard descriptions
and create on-line finding aids
As we appraise the collection and organize it into record groups, series, subseries, and sub-subseries, we take notes and write descriptions for these different levels of the collection in the project database program called Minaret. After the students refolder and rebox the material, they enter folder-level container lists on the same database.

Minaret has MARC format-based fields that can be exported to the internet and our library's OPAC system through templates that we have designed. Using this program allows us to integrate exporting finding aids to the Internet with our regular processing work. To see an example of a finding aid created on this database and exported to the Internet please look at our finding aid.

More information about
our photo cataloging.

Catalog photographs and memorabilia
In addition to the paper material, we are also cataloging and repacking several crates of memorabilia. We cataloged the memorabilia at the item level and will be taking digital photographs to create an image database. We arranged the memorabilia into eleven subseries based on material type. We have also individually cataloged over 1500 photographic prints and have produced an on-line photo database.

Project Notes | Phase I | Phase III