* How are the papers organized? The papers are organized by 16 series, some are categorized by chronological order and others by alphabetical order. I think that if the archival department were able to afford to pay someone to simply set hyperlinks from both chronological and alphabetical categories, searches would be much easier and simpler. Technology (scanners) today is already available and capable of reading, organizing, and categorizing documents. All someone would have to do is to load the feed tray with the documents. How difficult is this? After, someone can verify if the scanner had not made any mistake or faulty scans of the documents. Even if there were not enough funds available to pay for someone to check for mistakes, ordinary researchers who stumble on or discover mistakes could report their findings and have the necessary/appropriate corrections made.
* What kinds of materials are included? The kinds of materials that are included are “correspondence, related press releases, reports, speeches, magazine and clippings.” Someone/people had endured a lot of trouble or simply went out of his/her/their way to gather all of these documents. Is there anyone who could “step-in” to continue this work of contribution in the archival system/technology? What are the duties and responsibilities of the archival employees? Maybe someone who is working on a library project can contribute some time to this effort.
* How could you access these resources? Access to these resources could be accomplished by clicking on the link under the heading “ACCESS TO MATERIALS,” where a pop-up window will appear containing a form for the requester to fill-in. Advanced notice is advised for accessing this resource. It may be put away in archival storage and the time for the archivist to retrieve it may be overwhelmed by numbers of other requests, so prior notice may aid in simplifying his/her work load (and in relieving stress); or maybe the archivist may not be aware in time to coordinate his/her activities or efforts to coincide with your arrival to the library. So, acquiring access to the archives and its resources may not be as simple as checking a book out of the library. Good luck with your research involving the use of archival materials and resources. There may be an uphill battle ahead!
Excellent insight into the labor involved in archival processing! It’s a very manual process and doing archival research (while not difficult) can be manual and time consuming. Archives are definitely exploring ways to make their resources easier to find (including digitally encoding and linking finding aids) but it’s difficult to do anything quickly (document feeders can’t be used for original archival documents) because of the rare and sometimes fragile nature of archival materials.
The fragile nature of some documents is a good point, Prof. Almeida. Thank you very much for your insights.