Arrangement
and description of collections are primary tasks for archivists. Now we’ve talked about them before I
know, but it can’t hurt to repeat.
As I’ve said before two of the goals that the archivist has in dealing with a collection
are: to gain intellectual control (i.e. process the collection so you
know what you have.) and to make that information accessible to the public. To do that you look for any organizing
principles that the creator of the collection might have had or if there are none determine what groupings you can impose on the collection. These groupings are called series and
can be things like correspondence; writings; photographs; and so forth. Series can be further divided if
necessary into subseries like (1) sent correspondence and (2) received
correspondence. The next level is
that of the folder. A folder level
for correspondence could be a date (either month day or year), or a frequent
individual correspondent. Most archives no longer inventory
to the item level except perhaps photographs. Briefly that’s arrangement. Figure out an organizational scheme that exists or you
impose one and organize the papers to follow that scheme. Voilรก arrangement.
Description
is quite simply describing the collection to your public. Who created it, dates it covers, geographical
area if appropriate, inventory and description of contents including an
explanation of the series and subseries divisions. This is called a finding aid and historically was what visitors
to an archive would reference to determine which box of papers they needed.
Today finding aids, at least the ones I wrote, are also on line as are the ones at other institutions like the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech and the archives at the University of Texas in Austin. At one point on the wtda.org website for some collections you
could click on a section of the finding aid and the link would take you to the
records you wanted. That feature will not continue when all of the images transfer to the Portal to
Texas History. The Portal does not
use finding aids. On that website
metadata provide the search terms to gain access to the collection. Finding aids will continue to be available
on the wtda.org website, but a researcher will have to know to look for them -
not everybody does- and the links to collections will be gone. (Most already are.) I hope that the description part of an
archivist’s job does not get too muddled with the age of digitization. Metadata are all well and good for
searching, but you simply cannot replace the summary information in a finding
aid. Hope they don’t go the way of the dodo bird. They provide valuable data about a collection and
can provide enormous help for various types of researchers. Hooray for finding aids. Enough of my soapbox for today.
