A Deluge of Data: Our Mid-year Update

As the remaining calendar days of 2017 dwindle, Eira, Whitney, and I have begun to take stock of our data collection efforts and start planning for the next phase of this project: the wrangling. And boy do we have a lot of data to work through.

In a previous blogpost, Whitney shared details on the outreach phase of our project, and we’d like to share some numbers on our progress. To date, we have contacted 145 archival organizations seeking any data they may have on member institutions and address information. This includes:

• 51 State Historical Records Advisory Boards (SHRABs) and/or State Archives (including District of Columbia).
• 11 regional archives associations (multi-state, in most cases), such as the Midwest Archives Conference, or Society of Rocky Mountain Archivists
• 7 national archives organizations, which tended to be organized by the type of repository (e.g. the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums, and Archivists for Congregations of Women Religious)
• 45 state-level archives associations (e.g. the Consortium of Iowa Archivists or the Arizona Archivists Alliance)
• 29 metropolitan/regional archives groups (or areas generally smaller than a state), such the Miami Valley Archivists Roundtable or Chicago Area Medical Archivists
• 2 individual repositories

Thus far, the response has been encouraging. We have received responses with some form of data from 113 organizations, and 14 organizations directed us to other sources for directories. The remaining organizations have either told us they’re working on compiling a directory or list, or we can’t get a hold of them.

A very, very rough estimate is that we have collected data on over 34,533 archival repositories. We are certain that this number likely includes duplicate data for some repositories, but we won’t be able to ascertain how much overlaps until we dig into further. Still, we are really pleased with this number, which we feel is more broadly representative, in terms of geography and repository type/size, of our professional institutions in the U.S.

 

The data itself… well, it’s all over the place. And while we expect that some additional locations data could continue to trickle in, our focus will shift in January toward examining the data we have and cleaning it up.