Most of what I need for my PhD is in archives around where I live. One very important collection is in Philadelphia, in the care of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
I need advice on how best to go about mining their archives in a short amount of time. I am planning to go for a week but I can try for two if need be.
I do not need to read every letter in this guy's personal papers, just browse through for letters between him and a half a dozen people with him I know he did not correspond regularly.
The society offers a paid research service, which will come out to about the same as if I travel there in person and spend the week there, but I don't exactly trust them to be as thorough as I would be.
They allow cameras to take photos of documents but not scanners since these could be used to copy publication quality images.
Any tips as to how to best maximize my time there?
Just keep your head down and photograph, photograph, photograph. I recently had to do the same thing and I got thousands of pages of manuscript for my dissertation.
Ahhh summer, good old construction/long-distance archives research season! ;)
Here's an old write-up you might find helpful, but you sound like you've done this before (?) so it may be too basic for you. The good news is that you are really on the right track, I think you'll do just fine with a week to look through one collection for very specific material. In my experience most historians who come for a week actually finish on Thursday afternoon or earlier. How many cubic feet do you need to go through, and how well done is the finding aid?