Deaccessioning

Deaccession Requests

If you encounter materials that you believe should be deaccessioned, complete the Deaccession Request form (note: you must log in with your Airtable credentials to access the form). You won't get a confirmation email after completing the form, but if you'd like to confirm that your submission went through or see the status of your request, you can look at the grid view under the Deaccession tab of the Donation Offers base in Airtable. The collections team will be notified whenever someone completes the form, and they'll be in touch with you once they've made a decision.

This form is meant to be completed when you believe materials may actually be out of scope; you can still weed and discard blanks, unannotated duplicates, junk mail, and other materials with low research value from collections if they have a deed of gift. 

Recording deaccession actions

Once given approval to deaccession material or if the material is out of scope, you will need to record your actions in ArchivesSpace in the deaccessions module.

1. Go to the appropriate accession record and go to the bottom of the page and find the Deaccessions section. To the right, click the "Add Deaccession" button. And fill out the fields as follows:
   
   1. Portion: select how much of the accession is being deaccessioned
   2. Description: describe what is being deaccessioned
   3. Reason: describe why the material is being deaccessioned, for instance "Material is duplicate" or a curator decision, such as "personal material not related to MIT activities determined out of scope for the collection by DDC collection strategist, Mikki Macdonald."
   4. Disposition: describe what happened to the material, such as "material returned to donor" or "files deleted from the network storage location".
      
   5. Notification given: check this box if the original donor was notified of the deaccession
2. Deaccession date: add the date the deaccession happens, filled-out and formatted as with standard dates when processing.
3. Extents: list the extent of the material being deaccessioned. Follow the same guidelines as you would for an extent statement when processing a collection. The portion refers to the deaccession, so "Whole" would be all of the things being accessioned, etc.
   
4. Save the accession. If you are only deaccessioning part of the accession you are done. If you are deaccessioning the whole accession, proceed to the deaccession event steps below.

If you have deaccessioned the whole accession you will also add a Deaccession event to the record.

1. Click the Add Event drop down at the top of the accession record.
2. Choose the Deaccession event type and then click Add Event.
   1. Outcome: Pass
   2. Outcome Note: enter what you put in the Disposition field in the Deaccessions module
3. For the date section, you fill out the same information you entered in step 2 for the Deaccession date above, except the following two fields look slightly different 
   1. Date/Time specifier: Date Subrecord 
   2. Label: Deaccession
4. Under Agents, you will add two agents
   1. Role: Authorizer, Agent: Person who authorized the deaccession
   2. Role: Implementer, Agent: Person who did the deaccessioning
5. There should already a Record Link to the accession record
6. Click, "Save Event"