Archival core duties - Arrangement and description

            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.  Voilá 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.