Be careful what you ask for...
Archival geekery, with which is included some general thoughts about organisations and their ways.
During the repackageathon during Closed Week, one of my colleagues looked at my boxes and enviously remarked that the lot had fallen to me of several boxes of minute books, how much trouble could that be?
Quite a lot, it turned out, and not because they needed any particular physical conservation doing.
There was an original list which essentially treated them as freestanding discrete records of four separate organisations with some associated material.
Ummmmm, not so much.
As a result of concern during the 1890s over An Issue To Do With National Wellbeing, a committee was set up to explore this issue. The committee mutated into, or generated, a society to investigate the subject. Which we may call Society A.
Meanwhile, and practically simultaneously, two other associations were established to investigate pretty much the same subject. Which we shall term Societies B and C.
During the first decade of the C20th, societies A and B amalgamated to form Society D.
After the Great War, Society D, which was in a seriously dwindled state, handed over such of its assets as remained to Society C.
Society C puttered on until just after the Second World War, when its activities, assets, members (the few remaining) and archives (which, of course, included the records of Societies A, B and D, and records of the original committee of inquiry) were taken over by a larger organisation representing a wider field of which this society was dealing with one small corner.
The file of assorted literature also divided rather clearly into publications of one or other of these bodies.
Admittedly, sorting this all out was somewhat complicated by the fact that minutes of more than one organisation could be found in a single volume, since some prudent secretary had decided to use up all those nice blank pages rather than buy a new book.
There was a significant gratification in getting this worked out and the catalogue adjusted to reflect the relationships.
Why there were quite so many bodies all dealing with more or less the exact same subject, deponent knoweth not, though when I have a bit more time I hope to delve a bit into the details and might even get a post for the library blog out of it.
I'm used to organisations which are doing different stuff around the same subject and which it therefore makes sense to have as differentiated bodies: as it might be, providing aid to individuals smitten with some condition on the one hand and undertaking research into it on the other.
I've encountered organisations whose functions mutate over time.
I've come across instances where new organisations are set up to tackle issues which one would suppose some existing body was already taking care of, out of differences in ideology or beliefs about appropriate strategy or simply personal differences.
And of course there can be actual schisms, or amalgamations, or a series of these (something I have to do some more work on with some broad-front progressive bodies of the 30s, because blowed if I can grasp what's going on there).
And I suppose, if an issue is in the air, different groups are going to be amassing around it - which is certainly the case with my 30s progressives.
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