Report on the John Williamson Legge Archival Project

The University of Melbourne eScholarship Research Centre

Archives Project at the State Library of Victoria

Report on the John Williamson Legge (1917 – 1996) – Archival Project

Authors: Michael Jones, Ann McCarthy Date: 25 July 2008 Version: 1.0

The arrangement and description of the records of John Williamson Legge was today completed, and the Guide to the Records of John Williamson Legge updated as part of a project to complete the archival processing of the legacy material held by the eScholarship Research Centre. This work was done in 2008 by Ann McCarthy, Michael Jones and Rachel Tropea at the State Library of Victoria.

The archiving on this small collection of records was mostly completed when we came to work on it in 2008. We inherited eight archive boxes featuring old Austehc labels. Some of the records were not in acid-free folders.

The records were mostly item-listed in HDMS, but there had been little documentation done. The history of who processed this collection is unclear. A working office file for this collection could not be found, so Rachel created a new office file.

Tasks of note carried out in the course of item processing: New Accession: A new accession of records was processed and the records therein added to Series 4 – Inventory Items: LEGG00145 – LEGG00151. The records were found in a box at the eScholarship Research Centre amongst other eSRC internal record-keeping files, and are thought to be part of the records transferred to ASAP by John Williamson Legge's son David Legge in 1995.

Provenance: Research was done for the Provenance entry and other parts of the guide by Michael Jones. In doing so he located a photograph of Legge on Pictures Australia (originating from the Australian War Memorial) to use on the front page of the guide. This is cited in the "About the Records" section of the Guide, along with other references used to compile the Provenance.

Preservation: The cassette tapes in Series 5 of the collection were housed in plastic bags (1 bag per inventory item) in order to stop them falling out when the records were handled.

As with other collections, all the items were re-housed into acid free manila folders, and archival boxes, photos re-housed in archival sleeves and metal staples and paperclips were replaced with plastic. Archival SLV labels were placed over the Austehc ones.

Dates: Where the date is unknown for a record, the archivists had entered the date range of the collection as a whole, i.e. 1931?-1995?, and a note ‘No date’ in the Date Qualifier field was recorded. This applies to a large number of inventory items throughout Series 3 and Series 4. Although this doesn't seem to make sense when viewing the records within the context of the

Created by Michael Jones, Ann McCarthy on 17/03/2016 11:37:00 AM Page 1 of 2 XASL - Archival Project at the State Library of Victoria collection, it makes more sense when you think of the records in the completely open information universe (without dates a record will end up with 'infinite' start and end dates).

Title and Title Qualifier: A large number of inventory items had a Title Qualifier identical with the Title of that item. In some cases the Series title had been used as the inventory item Title and as the Title Qualifier. This duplication looks to have been done as a matter of course rather than reflecting the content of the record. Where this duplication had occurred, the Title Qualifiers were removed.

Correction to Series 3 Summary Note: The term 'SR Science' to describe Legge’s radio series has been removed from the series note for Series 3 because it looks to be incorrect. The radio programme run by Legge looks to have been entitled 'CR Science' so the references to ‘SR Science’ were replaced with ‘CR Science’.

For more information see the “About the Records” section of the Guide, and the eSRC internal record keeping file for the LEGG project.

Created by Michael Jones, Ann McCarthy on 17/03/2016 11:37:00 AM Page 2 of 2 XASL - Archival Project at the State Library of Victoria