MPLP Ten Years Later: the Adventure of Being among the First

The Northwest Archival Processing Initiative (NWAPI) was the first consortium to implement Greene and Meissner’s “More Product, Less Process,” and its member institutions were among the earliest to adopt MPLP methods. Now, ten years after the close of this NHPRC-funded initiative, MPLP is a widely-recognized methodology that has been applied to many collections, but MPLP has also influenced archival functions other than processing. This article revisits the original eight NWAPI consortium participants to explore how successfully archivists that were trained in MPLP were able to institutionalize its processing methods over the last ten years, and how MPLP affected other areas of their archival practice. This article details the history of the NWAPI grant, reviews the MPLP literature to show its development over time, and analyzes survey results from the NWAPI institutions. It concludes with a recommendation to guide the future of MPLP