- Created by Chris Tanguay, last modified by Joe Carrano on Apr 06, 2021 15:06
Appraisal During Processing
After initial appraisal is completed, there may be additional weeding to be performed when processing records and personal archives. Indicate content you've weeded in the processing information note in the relevant finding aid.
Examples of materials that may be weeded include:
Personal financial, legal, or medical records
Calendars (if routine and with little information)
Duplicates
Transactional materials (invoices, receipts, travel documentation)
Junk mail, spam email, routine mailings from professional societies
Student records (including theses), review to determine if record copy. Only retain record copy.
Personnel records, review to determine if record copy. Only retain record copy.
Publications, common MIT publications (e.g., directories) do not need to be retained. Books and articles by others may be removed unless there is a special relation to the collection or they are contain marginalia by the creator of the collection. Published software may also be removed or deleted if determined unnecessary for documentation or access.
- Disk images or original media determined not needed after the files have been extracted.
For digital material, many of these types of files mentioned above and below can be found through the tools in the reviewing for restrictions process. These steps should be followed for any material you believe may contain restricted material as it will be required later to determine where to store it if not weeded.
Additional Guidance
Personal Legal Documents
Remove and return to donor or destroy, with permission. Refer to correspondence within the collection’s control file for additional information and context.
Examples | Likely Locations |
|---|---|
|
|
Proprietary Records
Examine consulting records, decide if they should be kept and restricted, kept as non-restricted, or removed.
Remove and return company corporation records to donor or to company or destroy, with permission.
Processor may want to refer to websites of companies, government agencies, and correspondence in the collection’s control file for further information.
Examples | Likely Locations |
|---|---|
|
|
Financial Records
Determine whether the document is the record copy. Check financial records schedule. If not record copy, destroy. Refer to official records schedule at Office of the Vice President for Finance: Financial Record Retention for DLCs.
Examples | Likely Locations |
|---|---|
|
|
Disk images
Physical imaging or disk imaging of media and storage devices is the process of creating a bit for bit copy of the data on the original media including deleted, hidden, and system files. If the files you're working with are disk images you should take a number of steps to determine if you want to keep them or just the files contained within.
- Look at any the previous work plans, if it exists, to see whether the processor has indicated their rationale for creating disk images.
- Review this guidance of instances of when to create a disk image and apply those situations and your research about the collection when reviewing the images and/or extracted files. If the disk images are not extracted or you want to mount them to review the files within, follow the steps under the Disk image extraction section.
- If you've determined to weed files from the extracted files other than duplicates, system files, software files, etc. it is best to also discard the disk image unless you need the disk for a reason stated in the files in steps 1 and 2. The disk image will contain the files you weeded so removing the whole disk is the best option as to not create confusion for archivists in the future of the discrepancies and why we have files we don't want to keep. Regardless of content, if you end up keeping the disk after these actions, be sure to indicate why and the discrepancy between the two of files sets in the processing information note.
- See the removing digital material of this page for further actions to take to make sure you've documented changes so the package can be moved to preservation storage.
Removing digital material
In addition to documenting your actions as described above, if you have removed digital material from the collection, you will have to take steps to update the package before it can be moved into preservation storage. Go to the Ensure appraisal or rearrangement actions are reflected in the checksum file section for details on this process.
- No labels