Overwhelmed by your cataloguing backlog?

The 'Lone Arrangers' blog alerted me to this excellent PowerPoint presentation by Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner (on the Twin Cities Archives Round Table blog) about cutting down the time it takes to provide access to modern archival collections. It has some highly sensible recommendations, including:

Don’t perform conservation tasks at a lower hierarchical level than you perform arrangement and description

i.e. don't worry about getting rid of every staple and paper clip - your environmental controls should be taking care of any potential problems there. I also liked the recommendation from the experiences of Yale's Beinecke Library:

All collections should have basic descriptions before any receive more detailed description

That was the original premise behind the funding for collection-level descriptions on the Archives Hub. This is echoed elsewhere in the slides:

See every collection as a potential work in progress Let future events drive further work

I remember cataloguing the papers of Sir Cecil Clementi along these 'minimal processing' lines when I was working at Rhodes House Library and we were under pressure from the donors to produce a finding aid. I felt like I was cutting corners and hadn't done a 'proper' job, not having numbered every single piece of paper (or removed every single paper clip), but recall that his daughter was delighted with the end product. So perhaps archivists are too perfectionist at times and should be concentrating more on getting at least a minimal level of description out there for our users.