By Camille Moret, University Archivist.

*MPLP is a cataloguing approach by American archivist Marc Green in the early 21st Century and stands for More Product, Less Process. It advocates for minimal processing of archival collections with views to provide access to them as quickly as possible. 

As an institution with a rich and complex history of splits and mergers, it comes at no surprise that LUA holds school archives. The LCS fonds is a well-known and defined unit that lent itself well to some experimenting, as we face challenges of re-cataloguing / retro conversion, standards migration, and as we are sometimes getting “bogged down” by conservation (rehousing) imperatives. We decided to use the LCS fonds to quickly convert our paper-based MAD-standardised finding aid into AtoM, a web-based, multifaceted database that rely on the most current archival description standard, going for the bare minimum of mandatory inputting. We only extracted material that required very specific rehousing (textiles, some artefacts), but did not go any further, especially with photographic material. We did not re-mark or concatenate half-empty boxes (from the extractions), nor did we index in depth. 

This meant that we were able to present our catalogue entries within 3 days, and an additional day of work allowed us to take pictures of some items in the collection, write a blog post and other social media post for a small one-week media campaign, just in time for School Archives Day on 12 March 2025. 

Takeaways from that experiment are that we can know select and process certain collections exactly that way, leaving more materialistic (conservation, rehousing) tasks to later, which allows us to strategize, budget and staff them in a more project-based way. In terms of outreach, we now know we can literally deliver More Product with Less Processing, which for an archive service running on barely 1 FTE is a great achievement.