Accessioning Team works together as the “welcoming committee” for new archival collections

The four team members of the Accessioning Team—which is part of the Accessioning, Acquisitions, and Collections Control Unit (AACCU) at Beinecke Library—accession and process the library’s newly acquired archival collections. They ensure that all materials safely arrive at the library, provide pre-custodial support, and complete the verification process. They then create the accession records and archival finding aids that make those materials visible to users.

 

The team works with a high volume of materials, collaborating with staff across the library system. Thousands of linear feet worth of archival collections have been accessioned and processed. In the past year alone, the team has accessioned almost 100 new acquisitions, while also arranging and describing more than 75 additional materials, including dozens of additions to existing collections.

 

Rosemary K. Davis has been with Yale Library for nine years—first as accessioning archivist and, since 2022, as head of the Accessioning Team.

 

“I help make sure that my team members have what they need to get new collections physically to the library, to make sure we know what we have, to assess needs, and then to create that first stewardship record—the accession record. We help create a continuous and complete record of all archival materials that the library acquires.”

 

As accessioning archivist, Elise Riley focuses in part on pre-custodial work, which includes site visits to pack and pick up the collections coming into the library. She works to appraise, describe, and stabilize materials before they arrive. Riley collaborates with donors and curators to build strong relationships, ensuring that the collections have the care, stability, and visibility that ethical stewardship requires.

 

Tina Evans and Janet Lopes are the team’s archive assistants. As acquisitions arrive at the library, they create detailed accession records. These records contain notes on the content, history, and provenance of the acquisitions. They also contain donor information and important details that provide context and help make the collection “findable” within Archives at Yale, the library’s database. “Creating these records is the first step in good stewardship,” Evans said. 

 

Evans and Lopes also create finding aids, which provide detailed descriptions about the collections for public users and for researchers who wish to access the library’s holdings. Lopes—who was contracted to work on an audiovisual materials project before joining the Accessioning Team—also helps facilitate workflows for audiovisual materials, especially magnetic media and films.

 

“We have a very strong team,” Lopes said. “It is small, but we each bring individual characteristics, mindful of what we are trying to do—which is to provide access and sustainability and to get the most out of the information that we’re providing to the public. I think that’s our ability, and it’s what I’m most proud of. We’re like the welcoming committee for everybody who accesses the library’s collections.”

 

Recently, the team has been documenting the principles that guide them in their work, “confirming our dedication to those principles,” Davis explained. One fundamental principle is transparency, and, to that end, the team has made a collective commitment to making their work more visible to others. 

 

“We are undergoing a full-scale revision and build-out of the first official accessioning manual at the library,” Davis said. “The manual itself is going to be very, very helpful. It is going to give other repositories an example and a guide that they can adapt for themselves so they won’t have to reinvent the wheel to create some more-standardized local practices.

 

As part of their planning process, Davis said, “the team has had deep conversations about why we’re doing something, why we’re making decisions, how we’re recording it, and how we’re explaining that work to other people so that they can build on it. And I’m really, really proud of the way that we have come together to have those conversations.”

 

The team continues to think about how to design better workflows and improve management of systems and documentation. “These efforts are tied to our immediate work,” Lopes said, “but we also try to bring in people from other departments, to see how our work fits into their workflows.”

 

“We’re always thinking outside the box because we don’t work in a vacuum. Our unit is very diverse in terms of what we touch in the library system,” Riley added.

 

All the team members agree about the importance of collaboration with others and the role they play in facilitating that. 

 

“Our work is very interconnected with a lot of different people and a lot of different phases of work throughout the library,” Davis said, “ so the communication skills and the practical expertise that all my team members have is on display all the time in the ways that they interact with people, the way that they ask questions, the way that they save information, the way that they synthesize things and describe things.

 

“There is an incredibly huge amount of information to contextualize and make available to other people. And my team members are really just experts at it from start to finish.”

 

Read about some of the library’s most recently processed acquisitions.

 

Learn more about the collections at Archives at Yale.

 

—Deborah Cannarella