Intellectual vs. physical arrangement - smith-special-collections/sc-documentation GitHub Wiki

There are two kinds of arranging of materials that we do: intellectual and physical.

Physical arrangement is traditionally what all processing was, where we physically move materials to new boxes and place them in a new order. Typically, this would mean moving folders around and then taking an inventory of file descriptions. The description would list everything in box 1 first, 2 second, and so on.

Intellectual arrangement, as the name suggests, means that we are not moving the actual materials. Instead, we describe the material in the order we want it, but leave the actual folders in their place. We would typically take an inventory of the file descriptions and then put the files in the desired order only on the computer. The finding aids would look similar to those made with physical arrangement, but one box might have materials from multiple series or files in a different order.

At Smith, we do a mix of both types. Some collections don't come to us in folders and are just piles of papers, and these need physical arrangement before they can be described at all. Often when we receive an accession for an existing collection we will put the materials in new containers, rather than shifting folders around in the existing boxes. The new material may relate to numerous series in the collection, and these files are intellectually arranged into those series, but the actual folders are not moved. In most collections we do a mix of both styles. It really depends on the collection and its needs.

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