AJC
Western Thunderer
Catalogue again, I'm afraid. If usability of individual records was the aim we'd have cut up and reassembled Domesday Book centuries back and we wouldn't have it now. We copied it instead so still have the original and working copies. It's still an utter pig to use in any printed or electronic form which can be sliced and diced in dozens of ways. The 1941 National Farm Survey is much easier in many ways but exists in the form of millions of bits of paper in envelopes. That's catalogued at parish level - you could go to farm, farmer, number of tractors, horses...
Catalogue design is one of those areas of information science where I'm generally too scared to tread: two people can have hundreds of different views depending on what they do or don't know about what they're looking for.
Catalogues are getting better, but even the best started out as card indexes and most have no choice but to preserve the way in which things ended up in the archive. Some still are, card indexes, of course. The collection-based approach is more or less the only sustainable way to introduce new collections into a collection.
No, or at least, not categorically. What archives are about, basically, is not production for researchers - that's very recent, the last couple of hundred years or so - but so that an organisation knows about itself and managing the decay of that knowledge.
Here's my favourite example of this process. Allow me to present TNA E 163/24/31: Sir Henry Cole's Rat
It's a rat. Stuffed full of parchment. This belongs to an Exchequer series which spans c.1154 to c.1800 and presented as part of an enquiry into the state of the rolls of Chancery: Exchequer: King's Remembrancer: Miscellanea of the Exchequer | The National Archives
Since it's a mummified 19th century rat, it too is now decaying - I've had a 3D print of it on my desk. The series will also contain - as well as loads of parchment and velum - paper, wood, leather (in the form of bags, pouches, thongs tying things together, all sorts), boxes, tins, paper, whole generations of paperclip and the skincells of clerks, archivists and researchers long dead.
The point of the archive is to make sure that what we have today is available tomorrow. Public accessibility now has to be traded off against that in 5, 10 or 100 years time. Conservation for preservation and production is extremely skilled, very time-consuming an incredibly expensive. That's the archivists' province so we play by their rules and if the catalogue doesn't work the way that we as users would like, it's best to tell the archivists themselves that so that they can explain why that is, where what you are after actually is (if they've got it) or what uncatalogued - or barely sorted - stuff is out the back. The NRM has a relatively small amount of that sort of thing, a mere lifetime or two's unsorted material submitted in often fairly chaotic ways. Compared to the National Archives, they're minor league players.
Adam
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