Archiving 101: Arrangement & Description by Marc Levitt
Continuing this series as an introduction to the archival field, our hypothetical records have been appraised and acquired, and now reside in the archives. The next step is to begin the arrangement of these records: organizing them with the ultimate goal of making them accessible to future researchers. Often the first step is to create a preliminary inventory of the records which is usually a basic listing of the boxes and the types of records they contain. This process allows archivists to begin to assert intellectual control over the collection–another way of saying “we know what we have and where it’s at.”
Two important archival principle come into play at this stage: provenance and original order. Provenance (or respect des fonds–a French way of saying the same) states simply that collections are organized by their creator–records aren’t mixed in and among collections, even if they have similar records. For example, we have Senator Robert C. Byrd’s Papers and the Friends of Robert C. Byrd PAC Papers. Even though both contain records pertaining to the Senator, they were created by distinct entities (the Senator himself and the PAC, respectively), and thus remain separated.
Original order is also a fundamental guideline that states archivists keep records in the order in which the creators organized them. This preserves how the creating entity (be it a person or an office) ran their daily activities and can facilitate inferences made from how the records are organized (about relationships and context). As a bonus, adhering to original order also lightens archivists’ workloads so we don’t have to create an arrangement scheme out of thin air–the work has been done for us by the record creators.
Read the rest of the post at the Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies.
