Saving Face - A Shades Of The Departed Column

August 15

2009-08-15T01:33:00.000-07:00

SAVING FACE
BY REBECCA FENNING
A Monthly - Weekend With Shades - Column

As last month’s Saving Face discussed, provenance matters. Knowing where something came from and whose hands it passed through before it arrived in your archives can tell you a lot about its creator, its custodians and about the object itself. Earlier this week on her Photo Detective blog, Maureen Taylor outlined exactly how provenance can help in researching photographs and provides an excellent example of why it matters, in case you would like a little refresher.

Provenance does not just matter because of the issues I wrote about last time. When it comes to the world of archives, provenance can also help dictate the organization and physical arrangement of a collection, something that has great implications for family archives. In a collection of things, each item has a relationship to those items around it, and to the overall collection as a whole. The fact that an individual gathered together a bunch of items and passed them down as a group says something about that individual and those items. And so, preserving the collection’s integrity as a sum of gathered parts is important. Put another way, by breaking up a collection of items with the same origin, you are in effect destroying part of the context that comes with them and therefore diminishing their meaning and significance. An example might be a box of letters kept by my grandmother. They aren’t arranged in any particular order – just a jumble of letters in a box – but the fact that they are grouped together and had their source in my grandmother’s closet is significant. To physically separate them into new folders and boxes and to include no indication of their origins as a jumble of papers grouped together by my grandmother would be to destroy their context as a collection she created that all came in one box, together.

Taking this notion of preserving the integrity of collections even further is the archival principle of original order. Original order dictates not just that things that come together stay together, but that they ought to be kept together in the arrangement imposed by their original collector or creator (when such an intentional order exists). Doing this is a way to preserve the originator’s thought process and the relationships of collection items in relation to one another. A good example of the logic behind this are photographs like the one in Maureen’s article: If knowing the names of the photograph’s previous owners is good, then preserving the way it was housed in an album and its relation to all the other photographs in that album would be even better. Similarly, if you were a scholar studying the life and work of, say, Albert Einstein, wouldn’t you want to know how he arranged his files himself? Being able to look through his papers in the order in which he arranged them himself could tell you a lot more about him than seeing his papers arranged decades later by an archivist.

Original order makes life pretty easy, because, well, you don’t really have to do much. Of course, not all of us are lucky enough to inherit collections that have an original order. My family collections have all come to me as messes of things floating around in old boxes from now-defunct department stores without any discernible order at all. But at least I can record that those messes of things arrived at my door together from somewhere and someone else, and that still has value – beyond supplying evidence about the disorganization of my forefathers and mothers.

Article
Copyright © Rebecca Fenning

July 18

2009-07-18T01:33:00.000-07:00

SAVING FACE
BY REBECCA FENNING
A Monthly - Weekend With Shades - Column

We have all read, no doubt, those news stories about formerly looted (or otherwise questionably acquired) artworks being discovered in museums, and the litigation that ensues as former owners sue for their return. The case of the Bloch-Bauer Klimts or the ongoing dispute over Roman antiquities between the J. Paul Getty Museum and Italy are two such cases, and both of them hinge on a basic principle of collecting: provenance. Provenance is, quite simply, where something has been. Museums, libraries, archives, and other serious collectors record and research the origins and ownership histories of the things they own because of what these pieces of information add to their collections' value and integrity. Knowing the circumstances of a sculpture’s creation, who owned it and at what auctions it traded hands can prove (or disprove) its authenticity, and therefore establish its literal value. But this knowledge also contributes to a greater understanding of the object’s context in history and its significance beyond the information written on its pages or painted on its surface.

Leaving behind the problems of authenticity, looting, fraud and improper acquisition (because they are out of my depth), let’s take a closer look at the idea of provenance as it relates to contexts for understanding and viewing an object. A very rare copy of an important book, for example, is valuable on its own, but knowing it was once in the collection of a prominent collector who has inscribed his name on the flyleaf adds even more potential ways to look at it. Instead of being simply a rare book written by so-and-so and printed by so-and-so, it can also be studied as a book in the collection of so-and-so. Even the ownership inscriptions or bookplates of everyday people in books add more context, opening them up to analysis in terms of literary trends, reading practices or any number of other topics.

Provenance is one of my favorite things to research, which makes sense, because it is in many ways the genealogy of things. I am currently preparing an exhibition at work about this very subject -- specifically, about the way that everyday manuscripts, like cookbooks, or account books, or notebooks, are reused and added to by multiple generations of owners. Looking at how a cookbook, for instance, has been used by multiple individuals to record their recipes says something about the collaborative nature of cookbooks. Sometimes provenance information does not even include names of all past owners, but the evidence of multiple handwritings in a book still speaks quite a bit about the nature of books and their passage from person to person. Of course, even though it can be rewarding, provenance research and documentation is never really as sexy or exciting as it is in books like Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book, Jonathan Harr’s The Lost Painting or A.S. Byatt’s Possession, so be warned! But these authors all understand that the stories behind objects and their travels through time are of importance and documentation.

The concept of provenance is something important to consider in organizing and describing our own personal collections. The story of how the newspaper clipping announcing her parents’ 1904 engagement (actually, the entire page of the newspaper on which it appeared) found its way into an adhesive-paged photo album (otherwise known as Chemical Sandwich of Doom) of my grandmother’s says something about the importance she ascribed to this family document and her desire to keep it safe. Similarly, recording the fact that my other grandmother and her sister each have half of their parents’ billets-doux says something about their affection for their parents (and perhaps a little bit about sibling rivalry!). Keeping track of the provenance of these things tells more about them, their creators and their custodians than the objects on their own ever could.

In terms of practicality, tracking provenance and ownership is simple. If you have an inventory of family records and items, as I discussed doing in the last Saving Face column, incorporating provenance notes documenting where they came from is relatively easy. And those of you who have already read Maureen Taylor’s work already know about having a provenance or ownership field in your photograph information files. Even if you don’t have an inventory or database file as yet, simply tucking in a note (in pencil on acid-free paper!) in the file folder along with your grandma’s letters or in the front endpapers of the family bible is better than nothing. Recording the information now, when you have it, insures that where your cabinet cards came from won’t be forgotten.

Article
Copyright © Rebecca Fenning

Introduction

2009-03-17T19:18:00.000-07:00

SAVING FACE
BY REBECCA FENNING
A Monthly - Weekend With Shades - Column

Meet Saving Face

As both an archivist and a family historian, I have been witness many times to the gap in understanding that exists between genealogists and librarians/archivists over exactly what it is that the other group does.

This can run the gamut from archivist's negative stereotypes of genealogists as little old ladies in glasses who don't know what they're doing, to family historian's simple confusion when faced with an archival finding aid.

I also know there are a lot of archivist secrets family historians always want to know about things like preservation, storage and the art of folder labeling. For a long time, I've wanted to lend a voice to the conversation and some clarity to the confusion -- a chance that our dear footnoteMaven has now given me as a member of the Weekend with Shades team!

Start getting your archival questions ready, because I'm looking forward to answering them!

Bring your questions to Shades Saturday, March 21, for the first
Saving Face

"Archives for the Rest of Us"

March 21

2009-03-15T01:33:00.000-07:00

SAVING FACE
BY REBECCA FENNING
A Monthly - Weekend With Shades - Column

I hate the word "archiving." I really do. Why? Well, because I may be the only archivist to feel this way, but I think it's misleading. I feel as if the "archiving" of things like email have made archive-related verbs into buzzwords that get a lot of use, distorting our understanding of what archives curated by librarians and archivists actually are and how they are created.

So this is why in my inaugural column for Weekend with Shades, I'd like to explain what it is I actually do as an archivist and librarian, because this can be unfamiliar to even the most highly educated, library-frequenting of us. Indeed, most people I know who aren't information professionals themselves (that is to say, librarians or archivists or records managers) have no idea what I do -- and that includes my boyfriend, my mom, my sister, my best friends and pretty much everyone else I know. I hope that my quick walk-through of basic archival activities will give you a better sense of how archivists and archives work and a better notion of the questions I can help you to answer.

I have worked with lots of different kinds of archival collections from contemporary business records to 18th century family papers, legal records to professional correspondence, big collections to small collections. Regardless of the variations among these collection types, the basic archival concepts you use in approaching them remain the same.

With any new archival collection that waltzes through the door, one of the first steps in beginning work is accessioning. Accessioning isn't something that applies only to archives, but also to all kinds of library collections, and is basically the formal addition of a new collection to your institution and the recording of the particulars about your acquisition of it. Many places assign accession numbers to items and collections as they roll in, which helps track things as they are cataloged and organized, since things like titles (unless we're talking about books!) can change. In my institution as in many others, we assign numbers based on acquisition year, such as MS.2008.003. Looking at that number I can see that that number denotes the 3rd manuscript or archive acquired in 2008.

An old manuscripts acquisition/accession card file at my library

The next step with a collection is generally appraisal (though depending on the circumstances of acquisition, this can happen before accessioning, too). Appraisal encompasses a range of activities, but is basically making decisions about the overall purpose and value of a collection, especially what items you want to keep, and what items you want to get of (or, deaccession). For example, in the voluminous papers of a law professor I once helped work on, it was clear that the collection's greatest enduring value lay in his correspondence, lectures, and articles -- not in the leftover unused Christmas cards or advertisements about travel packages to South America scattered throughout his files. Here, it was easy to make the choice to relegate such items to the circular file, though it is not always so simple. With family papers for instance (especially when they are your family's papers), it can be hard to determine where to draw the line: blank deposit slips and check registers, old birthday cards, family correspondence, insurance forms, report cards, grocery lists, address books, wedding invitations, newspaper clippings, or photographs where everyone's eyes are closed can be kept or chucked depending on how you choose to rationalize the ongoing value and purpose of the collection as a whole.

A processed collection housed in acid-free folders in an acid-free box

Once the appraisal and weeding process is through, the next step is the processing and arrangement of a collection. This encompasses things like placing items in acid-free folders and other archival housings, labeling and numbering folders and boxes, and deciding on collection's overall physical organization. A major concept in archives work is the preservation of original order, which dictates keeping papers and folders in the order in which they arrive at your door, because this is hopefully the order in which they were kept by their author or collector. Doing this means you are not just preserving the items themselves but the organizational thought process of the creator. Of course, this only works when there is an actual original order in place -- not when you just have a free-for-all of papers and pictures and things jumbled in a box, which I find happens to me quite a lot. Collections without a discernible original order are a different ball-game, one of the places where you get to exercise your archivist know-how to impose your own order, choosing whatever organizational scheme makes the most sense to you, whether that be something thematic, alphabetical, chronological or something else entirely.

The next step of my usual archival practice is the intellectual arrangement and description of a collection. Now, this is where I think things get a little confusing when I try explaining my job because the archives jargon interferes a bit. Description, in most cases, is basically the finding aid creation step, but the problem is that most people don't know what a finding aid actually is! A finding aid, quite simply, is a guide to the contents of a collection and usually contains relevant historical/biographical background information, narrative-style description of the objects in the collection, and other things like library subject headings, related collections and acquisition information in addition to the real heart of things - the container listing, which itemizes folder by folder (or box by box, or even item by item) the actual stuff in the collection.

Part of a completed finding aid

In creating a finding aid, the most important thing is creating something that the researcher will actually be able to use, because though the components of a finding aid sound relatively straightforward, it is actually really easy to over-complicate things and end up with a product that only makes sense to the creator. This where intellectual arrangement comes in. See, if you have a collection that's only one cubic foot box, a straightforward list of folders 1-25 with no kind of hierarchical structure is pretty easy to browse through. But what if you have a collection of 20 cubic foot boxes, or 75, or 500? That can get confusing pretty quickly. Organizing into series (such as "business records," "correspondence," and "legal files," for example) and further into subseries (like "outgoing correspondence" and "incoming correspondence") makes this list a lot more manageable by imposing a hierarchy over your list. Another way intellectual order can be helpful is when you have, let's say, folders of letters from Mrs. A to Mr. B in box 1 but also in boxes 23, 78, and 174. It might not be practical to place these folders physically together all in one box (because it might disrupt original order, and also because it would take way too much time to do) but intellectually arranging your finding aid into series by subject or correspondent or alphabetical order can allow you to list boxes 1, 23, 78 and 174 next to one another.

An example of using intellectual ordering to alphabetize correspondence files instead

of manually, physically placing files in alphabetical order

These days, the standard and ideal form of a finding aid is one delivered on the internet and encoded in an xml schema called EAD, or Encoded Archival Description. Like any xml document, EAD adds semantic tags that denote finding aid contents. For example, titleproper tags bracket finding aid titles and acqinfo tags bracket acquisition information. These tags make it easier to search finding aids for specific information, like persname (or personal name) for example, and also allow for different displays of your document. I'm no xml or EAD expert, so I won't go into details here, but there are many resources on the internet for learning more about how this works, if you're interested. The encoded finding aid placed on your institution's website (or elsewhere) is how users find out what it is you have and how they know what to ask for once they're there.

A section of an encoded finding aid

So, to sum up, all of these steps are reasons why I don't like the word archiving. It's only my personal opinion -- a search of professional archives listserves show that other archivists use it all the time -- but hopefully by showing you how many processes are involved, I've illustrated why I feel the way I do about it. I also hope my description has given you ideas for questions to which you'd like to know the answers! Please feel free to leave any and all questions in the comments below as I'll be taking my cues for future Saving Face articles from you. That said, you should also know that the tasks I've described above are only a segment of the work I do everyday. I went to a traditional library school like any public librarian and I work in a special collections library, where I spend a lot of my days cataloging individual manuscript items for the online library catalog in addition to processing collections of papers.

So if you have any more traditionally library oriented questions, send those my way too and I'll do my best to answer them!

Please add all questions to this post. Rebecca will be visiting often to collect them.

April 18

2009-03-14T15:13:00.000-07:00

SAVING FACE
BY REBECCA FENNING
A Monthly - Weekend With Shades - Column

Last month I received so many excellent questions about various aspects of archives and how we can apply them to our family history questions that I felt terrible that I couldn’t answer them all right away. Hopefully you’ll be patient with me if it takes some time to get to the topic nearest and dearest to your heart!

Since there were multiple questions about the topic of appraisal and the ins and outs of throwing items away, and because in my opinion this is the trickiest thing of all when it comes to our (or at least my) own family collections, it seemed like a good place to start.

When I am working with a collection of business records or scholarly papers in my professional archivist capacity at work, it is usually not very tricky to make the cut of what material to keep and what material, if any, to discard. This past week at work, telling my graduate student worker to throw out individual RSVP cards for an academic conference but to keep any final response lists was a no-brainer, because the value of the information on these cards was minimal compared to the space they would take up in a box, especially considering that the final list provided nearly the same information in a better format.

Similarly, it is usually easy to mark deposit slips or canceled checks as trash, especially when there are monthly or yearly bank statements to summarize this information. Other things, like boxes of extra letterhead or business cards are garbage as long as you fish out 2 or 3 examples of each before relegating the bulk to the dumpster (you don’t need 500 copies of one card when 2 will do the trick just as well!).

Of course, these guidelines don’t always hold true (though the save-two rule usually does), because it is important to remember that not all collections are created equally and they do not all have the same exact evidentiary purpose and value. For example, the records of a business investigated for financial fraud should probably include any and all financial records, and the papers of a famed hostess who invited famous and notable folks to her parties could include every single RSVP card, while the records of a small academic organization would include conference papers and committee minutes, but not necessarily day-to-day financials or response cards.

Working with my own collections of family papers is a completely different story, though. I might consider myself pretty good as an appraiser and weeder of papers at work, but I will candidly admit that I totally stink when it comes to weeding my own family papers. Yes, I know that I don’t really need to keep all of the drafts of my grandfather’s application for a post-WWII Austrian pension (especially when I have the final application), nor do I really need to keep every single one of the greeting cards my grandmother liked to save, but I have a really really hard time throwing these things away.

I am not sure if it’s because the family connection makes each scrap feel like some kind of important artifact, or if I am just crazy, but I do know in my heart of hearts that the overall story my family archives tell about my family would probably be exactly the same without these items. I can rationalize keeping them, because the space they take up is minimal and because my family archive is not voluminous in the first place (because of the immigrant nature of my family and because other members of my family are thrower-outers, I don’t have things like family bibles or trunks full of letters like others might), but what if I did have overflowing boxes of papers? Then would I feel differently?

Weeding, when it comes to personal collections, is a much more intimate decision process than it is in the archive at work. You may feel that every piece of paper you’ve inherited is worth keeping, whereas but your brother and sister might have completely different views from you and from each other. There are no real rights and wrongs, but just as in a collection of papers or records in any archive, it is important to sit down and think about what the priorities are for your family archive, what the point of it is and what story it is there to tell. Being resolved (unlike me!) in your vision of what you would like your archive to look like and in the decision to pare away the unnecessary things (if they are present) like old junk mail, drafts of forms, or whatever else will help when it comes time to try and throw things out, though it will still not be easy to try and make the cut.

Are those blurry, crummy pictures your parents took of the Eiffel Tower in 1972 worth keeping? How about the postcards they sent to you from that trip? What about the blank postcards they bought but never sent? What about your great-grandmother’s letters home from Paris during her Grand Tour in the 19th century? What about the blank postcards she bought but never sent? What about her programs from going to the theater there? And then how about your great-uncle’s programs from community theater shows he attended in small town Indiana? What about his shoebox of news clippings about trains? What about his war ration book? What about his kids’ report cards?

I can tell you what I, professionally, would think to cut from this collection (those bad photographs, the unused 1972 postcards, the community theater programs, the news clippings), but that doesn’t mean this is the only answer to what is correct here. If your great-uncle was a train engineer his whole life, then maybe a box of news clippings unrelated to family matters are important to include. If your dad owned a postcard company, maybe his collection of unused Paris postcards is important to keep within the family collection as evidence of his research process. Or maybe you think all of these items have an important artifactual value of their own and don’t want to get rid of anything – that’s okay too.

Another thing to consider is that while perhaps there are items you don’t necessarily want in your family archive, that doesn’t mean they have to be thrown out. I have a drawer of unused postcards removed (or de-accessioned, in archives-speak) from archival collections at work that I keep to send to people.

There are organizations that might like boxes of news clippings about trains, or the community theater might love a collection of programs from their old productions. There are also fine libraries like the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, where papers from Apple’s family have been housed, which is always an option if you are concerned about being able to store and preserve your family’s papers on your own. Though they may make some cuts about what items they throw out (if any), a place like the Bentley with a reputation as an excellent historical library would probably make these decisions sparingly if at all, keeping everything of value to future family and social historians and throwing out only that which seems irremediably like junk.

Though terms of gifts differ, the usual procedure with de-accessioning from donated collections includes offering those de-accessioned items back to the donor, which means that there is probably a way to reclaim things you believe in but which the library doesn’t want. I suspect that Apple’s question about the seeming completeness of her family’s finding aid has more to do with decisions about description at the Bentley than it does with decisions about de-accessioning (phew!), but we will have to explore that concept in a later column.

To sum up, appraisal decisions are generally pretty common-sense ones when you get down to basics (unused post-its and blank check registers in the garbage!), though learning how to appraise records can take some time. I learned how to do this aspect of my job by working right next to a former boss several days a week over a period of months, popping tops on boxes (as she would say) and making decisions about their contents.

It was a slow process, me asking lots of questions about what should be thrown out and her telling me what to do and why, but over time, I learned why she was making the decisions she was, and how to make them myself. The learning curve here is even greater when dealing with family papers because of our own connectedness to the items in our care, but with a lot of thought and a lot of questions, I feel certain that this is a surmountable obstacle. Though we can’t all have the benefit of physically working right next to a trained archivist as an appraisal apprentice, it seems to me that it shouldn’t be impossible to learn this skill by simply asking questions from afar. So please feel free to email me with any appraisal questions, or to share your quandaries with us all in the comments below.

May 23

2009-03-13T19:45:00.000-07:00

SAVING FACE
BY REBECCA FENNING
A Monthly - Weekend With Shades - Column

There is a tiny kernel of truth in that final scene from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, when we see a box holding the Ark of the Covenant put on a shelf in a warehouse full of thousands and thousands of like boxes. In much the same way, all archives and libraries have hidden collections like this, though perhaps not so vast and not so concealed. But they are there.

Many of these collections are often things sitting in the backlogs of institutions. These materials purchased by or given to a library, but not yet cataloged or described in any way, can number in the hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of volumes and boxes, waiting for catalogers and archivists to get to them. Other hidden collections are described somewhere, but insufficiently, while still others are described cursorily in physical card catalogs and paper finding aids that are only accessible to those who know to look for them.

At my library, for example, the manuscript collections are largely described only through a physical card catalog located in our lobby. Further, the information on these cards can be pretty crummy, lacking things like subject cross-references and sometimes containing nothing beyond title and page count. Unless you knew about our library and our collecting scope (mostly 17th and 18th century British stuff) and knew we might have something you were looking for (an 18th century handwritten cookery book, perhaps), it would be extremely difficult to be able to find this very well hidden material. Other items in our backlog have never been cataloged at all and have been waiting on a shelf since their acquisition and are truly almost impossible to find unless I tell you that they are there.

These sorts of hidden and hard-to-access collections are a problem that the archives and library community is trying to address in a variety of ways. Understanding some of the issues and actions behind revealing hidden collections will help to make you, as potential users of these collections, more savvy about how to find information them and what the information you are looking at really means.

One of the most revolutionary ideas in the struggle to reveal hidden collections in the archives world was the development of the concept “More Product, Less Process." This new way of looking at archival processing (usually just referred to as MPLP) promotes the idea of getting a greater volume of material described by doing less detailed, item level work (Basically, describing things at a higher collection-wide level instead of describing or looking through them at the folder or item or page level).

This turns a lot of archival notions on their head, but has been adopted by a lot of places with great success. See, though an MPLP project does give you potentially less detailed information, fewer names, and less meticulously sorted collections, MPLP projects also get more information about more backlog collections out there to the user.

That might not sound great, but consider that at many institutions, unprocessed and undescribed collections sitting in the backlog are usually off-limits to researchers for various security and privacy concerns. Also consider that traditional item- or folder-level processing can take a long time – it once took me about 8 months to finish a more traditional finding aid for a large collection! MPLP helps archivists and users by getting more things described in less time, which means backlogs can be eliminated more quickly and finding aids and boxes put in front of researchers in a more timely manner. And that sounds pretty good.

Though an MPLP finding aid will probably give you a lot less information about the items in a collection than a more traditional and detailed folder or item level description might, the theory is that the researcher doesn’t necessarily mind looking through boxes that might be messy when they know they are looking for something they want. The fact of access to previously hidden collections and resources balances out the inconvenience of not knowing exactly what is contained in each folder, because yes, it might be nice to know if what you are looking for is there, but having access to something that might have taken years or decades for an archivist to get to if she were using traditional processing methods is even nicer!

This isn’t a comprehensive look at the idea of hidden collections or the archival processing techniques aimed at conquering them, but hopefully it gives you a little bit of an idea of what goes on in the uncatalogued basement storage vaults of archives the world over. Perhaps it gives you more reason to inquire at archives and libraries whether or not they have material you don’t see listed on their website or their publications! It might be just sitting there, waiting for an archivist to work on it, or for someone to check a physical card catalog for it. Resources like Archive Finder or the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC) can help you to find institutions like mine that might have those hidden treasures you are looking for.

And remember, I am always here to answer any questions that might turn up in that search!

Photograph Courtesy of the New York Public Library Digital Collections.

June 20

2009-03-12T18:01:00.000-07:00

SAVING FACE
BY REBECCA FENNING
A Monthly - Weekend With Shades - Column

Creating finding aids is a major part of my job, yet I always feel like they would take too many words to explain. Really, though, there is nothing complicated about a finding aid – at least in terms of what it is and what it is supposed to do. Currently, there are professional standards and best practices guidelines that define or prescribe what the structure and content of a finding aid should be, and this is what I think of when I think about finding aids. In getting bogged down in the details, I forget that finding aids are simply that: aids for finding stuff.

What finding aids do is tell you what is in a collection. Sometimes it might do this through item level lists, where each document is listed, but this takes a lot of time, which is why it is not the typical goal in these More Product, Less Process days. The original item level finding aid to the Oscar Wilde collection at my library was over 1000 pages – quite unwieldy to say the least. I’ve recently re-encoded and divided the original document into 5 smaller parts, hopefully making it a bit easier to navigate while still retaining all the hard work that librarians put into describing and typing out the information about every single item in the collection.

More typical are finding aids that enumerate collections at a higher level – by folder or by box. This gives you a sense of what might be in each folder or box, but at a much less detailed level. Other, very large collections, like those administered by the National Archives, do not bother describing collections at anything lower than the series or record group level. Series or record groups are larger divisions of a collection and can described hundreds or even thousands of boxes as a part of an even larger collection.

Of course, even with a small collection, a 4 or 5 or 20 page list of folder titles can be a bit overwhelming, not to mention not particularly helpful. This is where series and other hierarchical groupings come in handy. In a collection of family papers at work, for example, I used series to group documents and other items by family member responsible for them. Similarly, in a collection of records from a business or organization, series might take the form of different departments or job functions.

In my opinion, though, those are the straightforward parts of a finding aid, the parts you would probably be able to understand just by looking at it. The more complicated, jargon-y information comes at the front of the document, and is often ignored when we (as researchers) want to get down to the good stuff to see if there is anything of relevance in the container listing. The front matter that sometimes gets skipped, though, can provide helpful background information (Biographical and Historical sotes) and a sense of what level of description you can expect to see in the container listing as well as what kinds of materials are in the collection (Scope and Content notes). It can also give you information about how a collection made it to the institution in which it resides (Accession or Acquisition notes), details about the processing history of the collection (Processing note), the subject headings used to describe the collection in the online library catalog (Indexing Terms, Access Points, or Descriptive Terms) and sometimes even suggestions for related collections that might be worth checking out (Related Materials note). Not all finding aids contain all this information, but just checking out finding aids on a site like the Online Archive of California (just redesigned and now prettier than before!) or Harvard University’s OASIS catalog can give you a good sense of what kind of information may reside in the front matter of a finding aid and how much variation there can be within them.

Understanding finding aids isn’t just for archival research though. Indeed, I think there are some helpful ideas to be taken from them and applied to the description of personal archives of family history material, too. We all have papers and photographs that need to be organized, and there are lots of books and guides and websites about organizing research resources and products into binders or filing cabinets or digital files -- but these organizational solutions leave historical materials a bit out in the cold.

Before I went to library school, I used to file newspaper clippings, old letters and sometimes a photograph or two in sheet protectors in my series of binders alongside census printouts and birth certificates, because I didn’t really know what else to do with them. Thinking more about the nature of archival collections, though, made me realize that these materials could and should be curated in a completely different way – not just as source material, but also as artifacts.

At some point a few years ago, then, I put together a sort of finding aid of the papers I’d inherited from my mother’s parents, using the information I’d learned about things like series, about putting things in folders, about managing archival collections in formal repositories. Just as it would in an institution where I might be doing research, the finding aid to my grandparents’ papers is a way for me to wrap my head around what materials I have to work with, without my having to pull them out and flip through them.

It gives me an intellectual control over these items that I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t purposely sat down to catalog them and document their contents. Sure, I would still have some sort of idea of what these documents were if I hadn’t written up a container list for them, but it would be just that – an idea – as opposed to a collection under my control as the collector and as the archivist.

In a library or an archive, you catalog things so that people can find them. You catalog things and describe them in finding aids so that you know what you have, and researchers will know what you have. Cataloging your personal archive of materials, creating lists and guides to them, will help you to know what you have.