Well, Alex, since you asked...

I spoke at the ARMA Canadian conference in St. John's in May on this very
topic, and also about the different approaches of RM and archivists to
managing information.  If I get a chance, I will write a paper about it.

I should mention before I start that I am not longer working at the Archives
of Ontario -- but I was there to start the move.  I also spoke previously
about project management for RMs and that is the real subject of my posting.

When I spoke about project management for the first time at ARMA Las Vegas I
had an unexpectedly huge audience.  No problem.  I just had to mention the
word "statistics" and dozens of audience members felt compelled to leave the
room and try their luck somewhere else.

Why is it that so many people in this field aren't comfortable with
statistics, and information gathering?  They should be.

Leaving that question to just sort of float there, I will tell you, Alex,
that, in addition to using everything I knew about project management to
plan this move, I added a few additional wrinkles.

First, Excel was my best friend.  Why?  Because in order to plan a project,
you need data, and accurate data was not available (collections-wide
information would be one of the big wins once the work was done). Since we
were forced to work with estimates, we made sure to keep very good track of
all the work that was done.

I was fortunate to work with an archivist, Marie-Josee Levesque, on planning
this move.  She's much better at excel than I am.  Anyway, over the course
of the 2 yrs plus I was there, we designed several data collection tools,
including specialized ones for special media.  Sometimes we sampled to get a
more accurate estimate (also a highly recommended thing to do).

I learned that media is much more important to an archivist than to a
records manager.  I learned that I was working with several specialists, and
each one knew their own little piece.  The hard part was that we were
approaching all of the media with a minimum set of requirements -- is it
properly packed in a good box?  And is there an inventory of the contents of
the box?  With virtually no reliable totals of the number of containers,
material scattered over 6 locations (5 warehouses, 1 downtown facility), and
a legacy of annual transfers of material (government, not the private
donations) that, due to limited resources, had never been looked at, this
was not easy.  Two years later, we had bar-coded and inspected 319,000
containers (265K were standard records storage cartons) with 3 offsite teams
of contracted out staff at 3 warehouses with staggered start ups, working at
an average of about 6 minutes per container for standard cartons, and about
2 minutes per data entry update into a web-based interim database on a SQL
platform.  And that's not even including the  separate projects for maps,
photos, and other special media. I couldn't even lump all the maps together.
There were rolled and flat maps, plus rolled and flat architectural --
that's 4 additional project plans!

Anyway, to summarize my experience - not an easy thing! But I will try - it
was just a lot of logistics, planning, and constant monitoring of the rate
people were working.  Did I mention constant problem solving?  Really it was
just tackling each thing as it came up, and getting lots of advice from the
record centre guys (commercial and government-run).  Plan for the worst,
expect the best, and reality is somewhere in between.  It was a basic
records management inventory project, with a few extra wrinkles thrown in to
keep things interesting...

Anyway, I've written too much, but didn't have time to make it shorter :-).
If anyone is interested I have a short (2 pp.) project statistical summary I
used as a handout for my presentation, as well as a PDF of the data sheet
inventory form we used to gather data about each box.  I would be happy to
share them with the list, if you email me directly (not to the list! I am
not responsible for any "me toos!").

Julie Luckevich, BA, MLIS
Eclaire Solutions
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