Glossary of Archival Terms - smith-special-collections/sc-documentation GitHub Wiki

This page has some common terms that are essential for understanding processing.

Accession

When a new collection comes to an archive, we need to create a record of what we received, when, from whom, and under what restrictions. Accessioning is recording all this information and getting materials ready to go into the archive. During accessioning we record everything we know about a collection, make a basic description so that researchers can have access to the new material, and stabilize the materials (i.e. make sure that there's nothing in the collection that is going to damage the materials, like mold, bugs, etc).

Accession can also be a noun, meaning a group of materials that was all brought into an archive together. If a donor gives us a bunch of their papers in 2009 and another chunk in 2012, each of those groups is an accession. We keep track of the accessions separately so we know the differences between the materials. For example, if the 2009 material came from her home, but the 2012 material came from her workplace, we would expect that they would have different kinds of records and we would therefore treat them differently.

Deaccession

Every once in a while, an archive decides to remove material from a collection. This could be because the donor wants it back, it fits better at another archive, the donor accidentally gave us material that is low value (like their junk mail), or a number of other reasons. When we remove something from a collection, we always record why, what exactly it was, and where it went after we got rid of it. That way, if a donor or researcher asks us about materials we can tell them exactly what happened and we know it isn't missing. Getting rid of materials and recording this information is called deaccessioning.

Finding aid

Finding aids are descriptions of collections that make it possible for researchers to find material, understand what is in a collection, and find any restrictions on access or copyright. Finding aids can be in a wide range of formats, but here at Smith we put our description up online, so that people can find and search within the collection much more easily.

Finding aids also allow archivists to have control over our collections so that we know what we have, where it is, whether it is organized or not, our legal requirements, etc. A good finding aid that is well written can be transferred from any format into any other format so that if one technology becomes obsolete we will be able to migrate the information into a new technology. I.e. if the online database we use to record our finding aids, ArchivesSpace, becomes obsolete, we need good finding aids that we can move into whatever format supersedes it. We generally do this by following standards about how we structure our finding aids; in the case of archives the standard we follow is the Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS). We can also do a lot of database coding in the background of our websites to automatically structure, move, or manipulate our data.

Original order

When someone/an organization keeps records, they often have an organizational system and a way of labeling things. What we call things and how we organize them can say a lot about how we think about our world. For example, someone who doesn't see a division between their personal and professional life might have their work records and personal correspondence mixed together, or someone might label a file about a crush with hearts even if they never got together with that person. We try to disturb the order and description of files as little as possible when we process, i.e. we keep the original order, so that we don't lose this information.

However, not everyone has clearly structured files, and many people have filling systems that they don't keep up to date or that are so confusing that it is impossible for researchers to use. In these cases, archivists will rearrange papers.

Provenance and respect des fonds

Respect des Fonds is an old French archival term, and it explains the main difference between archives and libraries. Libraries organize things by subject, so if you want to learn about the theater you go to the theater section and it will all be there (this is called co-location). In archives we are more interested in where things came from and who produced them (this is the provenance of the papers). Respect des Fonds translates roughly to respect for the origin and archival creator. It means that if someone gives us all their records, we keep them all together in one collection. If you wanted to learn about the theater in an archive, you would look at the papers of a playwright, a director, a science professor who happened to be an actor in his spare time, etc. We want to respect that everything that is in one collection was created in one origin, by one family, individual, or organization. In this way, we don't lose the original context in which a record was created and you can see a creator's life in its entirety, rather than divided by subject.

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