Hi, everyone. I'm an Americanist PhD student about to embark on my first serious research trip. I wanted to ask a question that may be silly, but that I hope I get some sense of: how long, on average, do you spend at each archive? I understand that it depends, but as a rule of thumb, how long do you spend in each repository? I'm trying to get a ball-park figure for financial planning purposes. Thanks!
I'm an archivist, I can ballpark you from the other end?
"Professionals" spend anywhere from one day, to one week, to one month working with materials on a research trip. What we want is to get down to brass tacks for each trip, what's raw cubic feet of paper you want to go through at each place? (One standard record carton is 1 cubic foot, three Hollinger boxes = 1 ft^3) Conservative estimate is 1 hour per ft^3. Good researchers can go faster, since they can mentally discard things quicker.
If you're extremely ball parking it and don't actually have collections in mind, estimate a week for a trip, that's the most popular.