Structure of collections - smith-special-collections/sc-documentation GitHub Wiki

An archival collection is made up of the papers or records of one creator or group of creators. This creator could be a collector, an individual, an organization, or a family. We create further divisions and structure within a collection so that researchers can navigate and find what they need. These are called series, i.e. broad groups of related materials.

Series can be based on format (e.g. photographs or correspondence), an activity (e.g. work records), a time period (e.g. childhood papers), a person or department within an organization, etc. We use whatever series make sense for a particular collection. Series can be further divided into sub-series, if necessary.

Within each series there are files. Traditionally, this would be a physical folder with related materials. However, now it is more often an intellectual category than a physical one. For example, 4 folders with the same kind of materials could be a file, or a file can be made up of both paper and digital material, etc. The main idea is that a file is a small group of related materials, and their grouping is broken down enough to let researchers know exactly what they will find in the file.

As an example, think of the papers of a Smith College professor. It might be made up of three series: teaching materials, correspondence, and writings. Writings might be divided into sub-series of major projects or it could be fiction and non-fiction, depending on the type of writing the professor did. Files could be the individual articles or books. An article often goes through several drafts, so one article's file might have three items (i.e. three article drafts) in it. This diagram shows a broader example collection structure:

Collection strucutre

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