Collections Assessment ~ the good, the bad, and the ugly
In 2016, GCIHS joined a consortium of 15 local history organizations under the umbrella of the Friends of Island History (FOIH). In May 2017, FOIH retained HistoryIT to perform assessments of the collections, catalog systems, and digital initiatives of each of the fifteen organizations. This review was undertaken to “improve storage of and access to the physical collections, develop a plan to create and draw value from a comprehensive digital collection…. and make the critical history the organizations protect optimally available to the public.”
There’s good news and bad news for GCIHS. In a nutshell, our basement archives storage space is poor and our FileMakerPro collections database needs to be replaced. On a scale from 1-10 (one being the lowest), HistoryIT rated the GCIHS archive as follows: Condition: 5; content: 9; catalogue: 3.5; and capacity (ability to work with others and accomplish a great deal of work in a short amount of time): 8.
Our overall rating was 6.4. “GCIHS’s overall rating is among the highest of the FOIH participants, placing the society among organizations with funding and staffing resources that far exceed their own. The GCIHS is working diligently to protect its historical collections and engage audiences in the digital realm, but the collections are in critical danger due to the limitations of the current storage space.”
Read the complete report here: HistoryIT_FOIH_Reports_GCIHS.
