Much Ado about Paper Clips: "More Product, Less Process" and the Modern Manuscript Repository

This article is a critical examination of the methodology and arguments of Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner's influential article "More Product, Less Process." Greene and Meissner rely heavily on data from a survey of the profession's processing habits, which is skewed to manuscript repositories at colleges and universities rather than institutional archives. This article also examines untested assumptions underlying their arguments, reflects on why manuscript repositories resist change, and questions the wisdom of a standard metric for large manuscript collections. It asks whether "More Product, Less Process" addresses the critical issues facing manuscript repositories.