Archival Deaccession and Preservation

In my senior thesis project I'm going to be working with the Mark Ellingson Collection in the RIT Archives. This collection is a large one and until I talk to Becky, which will be soon, I won't be able to know what the scope of my work in this collection and what is actually feasible for me to accomplish. However when I spoke to Becky about the collection what she said she wanted done was that she wanted the boxes combed through to remove ancillary materials that aren't related to Mark and Marcia in a discernible way and try to contact relatives that may want it back to try to return these materials. She also wanted to rehouse the large scrapbook collection to protect it from damage from its current housing.

With these two focuses in mind I delved into research on deaccession and preservation in archives. There are many ideas and opinions about deaccession across the archival field. There are also many opinions about when deaccession is or isn't acceptable and also many theories about collections management that revolve around this issue. These opinions range from archivists that refuse to remove anything from their collections to those that arguably remove too many items from their collection. I've been looking at ideas and ethics surrounding these issues to help inform my later work with the collection.

I still have to look more deeply into preservation as well, as all of the work with the scrapbooks will be that of archival preservation.