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STHC-L: The Science, Technology and Health Care Archives Forum
[Previous Posting] [Next Posting] Arrangement of records in a hospital archives?
This is my first time to query this list. Thank you in advance for any counsel you can give me. I am a medical librarian and now also wearing the hat of archivist for a new archives. I am assisted by a few wonderful volunteer retirees and a part-time archives coordinator. None of us are professional archivists, but we're reading and studying and trying to do the right thing. We are using PastPerfect version 4. Our mission is to preserve historical records for a health system of three hospitals. We have reached an impasse on how to arrange records. I know that normal practice is to keep records grouped by the person who donated them. My helpers are arguing that we should dispense with that idea and instead group records by department. They argue that we are more concerned with the functions of the hospital than with people. So say a retiree named John donates minutes from pharmacy department meetings and music from the hospital choir (part of religion department). They would say to put the minutes in a collection called Pharmacy and the music in a collection called Religion, rather than having a collection called John. If we ever needed to know what John donated, we could see that in the accession record in PastPerfect. Arranging by department would make it easier to trace the history of a department. On the down side, I think shelving will be harder this way. We might allow one drawer for a department, and then get a big donation so that four drawers are needed, necessitating a lot of shifting. What is right here? What are the pros and cons of each method? Is there a third method we haven't thought of yet? Many thanks! Beth Treaster, MSLIS Health Sciences Library Saint Francis Hospital 6161 S Yale Tulsa, OK 74136 bhtreaster@saintfrancis.com Voice 918-494-1210 Fax 918-494-1893 ____________________________________________________________ STHC-L - Science, Technology, and Health Care Archives Forum STHC-L@lists.ucla.edu http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sthc-l STHC-L@lists.ucla.edu STHC-L Archives -- Main Index STHC-L Archives -- 2006 Message Index |