Archival Practice: A Brief Introduction: Arrangement and Access

Purpose of arrangement

Archival arrangement serves various purposes, such as:

• Maintaining the integrity of groups of documents
• Providing context and emphasizing relationships between items
• Facilitating searching and access
• Protecting the authenticity of documents

Archival arrangement is linked to the principles of provenance and original order. The way archival documents are arranged in a fonds should reflect the way they were organized by their creator or previous owner. This can provide crucial context and evidentiary value related to how the documents were created and utilized.

Arrangement levels

Arrangement levels reflect how records are organized in an archive, going from large groups of related documents to specific items. The hierarchy of levels can vary from one archive to the next. Here is a pretty basic example of an arrangement hierarchy.

• Fonds - Contains all the documents that come from a specific source (person, organization, etc.). Fonds can be divided into subfonds.
• Series - Includes documents within a fonds that are related due to being created or used as part of the same activity or for a common purpose. A series can be divided into subseries.
• File - A group of documents that are related by topic or purpose, usually organized in one or more folders.
• Item - An individual document.

Description of archival resources

Providing rich descriptions for archival resources through metadata facilitates access for information seekers. Descriptive metadata assigned to an item tells researchers what the item is about. Also, in digital interfaces, descriptive metadata provides terminology that helps researchers locate the information sources they need by using keyword searches. This illustrates the importance that metadata has in helping researchers navigate archival content and enhancing the findability of archival items. 

It should be emphasized that archival descriptions should provide contextual information that helps fully convey the meaning of items. Important context can be provided by highlighting a document's relation to other documentary sources, historical individuals or groups, or significant events or processes. All this information can be useful to researchers in the course of their investigations, and it can also add coherence and meaning to groups of records.  

Finding aids

Finding aids are resources created by archives that describe the contents and structure of a group of archival documents and provide important contextual information, such as information about the creator of the documents, the historical context around their creation, relations to other archival material, etc. Finding aids help researchers gain a thorough understanding of the resources. They also aid researchers in locating specific items within the larger group of documents.

Here are some links that provide additional information on finding aids:

• Definition of finding aid (Society of American Archivists)
• Creating Finding Aids at the Archives of American Art (Smithsonian Institution)
• Finding Aids: Tools and Tips for Basic Description (Documentary Heritage and Preservation Services for New York)

Access points

Access points are terms such as personal names, names of historical events or periods, places, activities, subject terms, etc. that may be used by researchers in a search to locate documents related to their topics of interest. Access points have the purpose of facilitating retrieval. They can be listed in an index or catalog.

More Product, Less Process (MPLP)

MPLP is a mindset that prioritizes providing users access to archival collections as quickly as possible. This way of thinking opposes the idea of delaying access until groups of documents are described at the most granular level, which may take a long time. It encourages cutting down on excessive processing and instead focusing on attaining a "Golden Minimum" which satisfies the basic needs of users who will engage with archival materials. The concept of MPLP has sparked much discussion in the archival community.