Researchers' Role and Processors' Perspectives

While working with archival material, the Bentley's processors should remember that the roles of themselves and the institution's researchers:

• Researchers come to archives to do research: don't do their job for them. By extension, processors should not review every single document; analyze a creator's motives, character, or the relative importance of events; or become an extraordinary expert in a material's subject matter. The primary value that the processor brings is their ability to recognize the organization of the materials, delineate key functions in the individual's or organization's activities, and document this information in finding aids and catalog records.

• Processors bring their own perspectives and biases to processors to this work. The Bentley's processors should avoid deliberately imposing false narratives by highlighting or minimizing the relative importance of activities, events, individuals, or organizations. However, as noted more fully in the Conscientious Processing at the Bentley Historical Library section of this site (public link), processors will always bring their cultural, personal, political, and religious perspectives to this work. Consequently, processors should consider how their processing may impact different users; provide objective and straightforward descriptions; avoid editorializing; and neither minimize accomplishments nor emphasize faults.