Week 3 Objectives and Readings Week 3
The objectives of this unit are:
To understand what accession means To review provenance, original order, etc. To identify the minimum recommended descriptive elements in a finding aid To be able to describe what more product, less process (MPLP) means To understand the role of Encoded Archival Description (EAD) Actions for this unit:
Complete the required readings (titles in red text) Look over the recommended readings (in black text) Review the PowerPoint (PPT) in the module for this weekPreview the documentView in a new window Post your response to the discussion board prompt and to a classmate’s post Only one chapter of Millar for this week, now that we've “caught up” on some of the background. It's tough to lose those extra weeks that you get in fall and spring – but I will try to keep the readings lighter for the rest of the summer!
As you know, there's an entire course at SLIM on arrangement and description. It will give you a very good overview of the entire process – as well as some solid practical experience – should you wish to pursue this line of work. For the Intro course, you need to pick up some of the terminology (EAD, DACS) and understand what a finding aid is designed to do. In short – and I'm sure many of you know this – EAD, or Encoded Archival Description, is the standard used to encode finding aids for use online.
DACS (or Describing Archives: A Content Standard, 2d ed., 2013) is our a&d standard in the U.S. Millar, who is (I think) Canadian, makes strenuous efforts to include European, Canadian, and Australian standards; it's good to know that they exist, but you will use DACS far more often. DACS specifies 25 descriptive elements, some of which may not be useful for a given collection, and nine of which are earmarked as the bare minimum. This is covered in the PPT.
Some archival scholars would be happy to jettison the finding aid as we know it. No one is quite sure what the final role of metadata in the archival setting will be. Can you have an archive without traditional hierarchical finding aids, built solely on item-level metadata? That’s an idea that has some enthusiastic proponents today – something that would have been anathema ten years ago. If so, won’t this dump us back into a pre-MPLP processing nightmare? And won’t it destroy provenance (if no one cares where anything came from)? Those are issues we don’t have to face… yet. The discussion, however, has already started.
Required readings:
Millar, 2d ed. (2017), Chapter 11: Arranging and describing archivesPreview the documentView in a new window This is pretty tedious reading. Scan it quickly now; it will be quiz fodder later, and you can spend more time on it then. Recommended readings:
Greene & Meissner (2005): More product, less processPreview the documentView in a new window This is one of the most influential articles in archival scholarship…ever. If you didn't live through it, you can't imagine how massive the processing backlogs were, even in reputable, well-financed, and well-staffed repositories. Greene & Meissner fired the proverbial shot across the bow. I agree with the article's premise (though this is not to say that I agree with every statement in it.) I’ve seen way, way too much time being devoted to the micro-level writing and re-writing of finding aids, while numerous equally worthy collections sit inaccessibly in untouched boxes. Ironically, it’s often not the “best” collections, or even the ones at greatest risk, that receive the most attention. As a matter of policy – when you have to choose – I side with Greene and would rather see more product, less process. Others, of course, disagree, and would prefer to get the finding aids for a few collections in impeccable order before moving on to the next chunk… I always think about an archivist who laughed and told me, “That box has been under my desk for 25 years.” The following items are examples of the types of forms used in archives. If you are unfamiliar with them, take a look.
Accession form samplesPreview the documentView in a new window (Library of Congress) Deed of Gift formPreview the documentView in a new window (UNC) Bancroft Library Finding Aid templatePreview the documentView in a new window
Week 3: Arrangement & Description Sheila O'Hare No unread replies.No replies. Business first: I would like to set up office hours and an online curation training session (which will be recorded for you if you cannot attend). If certain days/times are impossible for you, send me an email, and I'll try to work around them. Results will be posted next week. The appraisal discussion was excellent. I did not want to steer the responses, so I stayed out of it; starting this week, I will be commenting on your posts directly. For appraisal week, please read this document: Comments on appraisal discussion
Based on the examples in the PPT and in the textbook (or any other finding aid on the web that you want to use), are archival finding aids too specialized for the ordinary user to master? Do you have any suggestions on how the finding aid might be improved as an access tool? If not, what should the role of the reference archivist be?
Having no archival experience and being inspired by the article from Greene & Meissner, I decided to take more philosophical and analytic approach to answering this question.
So first, what is a finding aid? According to the online version of the SAA’s Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology, it is defined as: n. ~ 1. A tool that facilitates discovery of information within a collection of records. - 2. A description of records that gives the repository physical and intellectual control over the materials and that assists users to gain access to and understand the materials. Notes: Finding aid1 includes a wide range of formats, including card indexes, calendars, guides, inventories, shelf and container lists, and registers. - Finding aid2 is a single document that places the materials in context by consolidating information about the collection, such as acquisition and processing; provenance, including administrative history or biographical note; scope of the collection, including size, subjects, media; organization and arrangement; and an inventory of the series and the folders. (Wikipedia, 2017).
From this definition, we can immediately note two roles of the finding aid – (1) it is a discovery tool and (2) it is an inventory control tool. I would add a third role (3) rhetorical expression of the institutional archive (i.e., how does one feel about it, how does it present itself)
At an abstract level, the finding aid is a representation of the archives in all three senses of the term archives – the archival institution, the archival space, and the archival collection. It maps to these physical entities and depending on how well it has been crafted it can range from a poor representation (incomplete, inaccurate, or poor layout of information) to something sublime (comprehensive metadata, evocative descriptions, digitized scans, advanced search tools, contextual description, etc.).
At its best, it provides a virtual model of the actual physical collection which creates new ways of being able to work with the archival collection. Reading through Millar and this week’s PowerPoint deck, there has been a lot of scholarly effort expending to make finding aids useful, consistent across archives, and a way to bridge the need to maintain original order but still allow different orderings for other purposes. Controlled vocabularies like DACS, Encoded Archival Context, Getty Thesaurus, etc. along with metadata standards like EAD and creation tools like ArchivesSpace compliment several centuries of books, articles, scholarship and bodies of practice.
Here’s the takeaway from this – by providing this underlying level of descriptive data, the finding aid no longer has to be a “single document” arranged in one fixed order for all time – it can be virtualized into many different forms of representation concurrently. It can be a traditional printed finding guide, it can be a searchable database, it can be a webpage, a spreadsheet, illustrated brochure, or even a question answering artificial intelligence. And each representation can provide more or less granularity of detail depending on the needs of the audience for that particular finding aid. Folksonomy tagging can be employed to make material findable outside the controlled vocabularies. And representations can be “mashed up” with other collections to provide even more value from the archival collection. And more things that I can’t even conceive. Augmented reality, data mining, and informatics are suggestive.
But…and there’s always a but.
It’s a lot of work to do this and as Greene & Meissner comprehensively demonstrate – where is the time to do these things going to come from when the volume of archival materials is accelerating, funding is diminished or constant, and keeping up with technology is difficult?
Cleary, these limitations are well known and as Millar demonstrates throughout chapter 11, certain activities and practices must be given higher priority. Item level description should be postponed until collection level information is recorded. And maybe not even after that.
—
The Wikipedia page on finding aids has a nice list of find aid examples and browsing through several provides an instructive demonstration of many of the points made above. Some of the layouts are easier to navigate than others. Some have multiple paths to reach the desired information. Some are aesthetically unpleasing – others meet high standards of good information design. And each provides some level of discovery. But how well is this done?
Ultimately the judgment of any finding aid will be how efficiently does it let a potential user know if the information they might be looking for is in this collection or more broadly, what is in this archives and could it potentially meet their needs?
And as an aside, how easy is the finding guide itself to find? (i.e., how findable is the archive?)
Cheers,
-B
P.S. I will save my thoughts on comparing archival practice to business practice for another time.
Finding aid. (n.d.). Retrieved June 10, 2017 from http://www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/f/finding-aid
Finding aid. (n.d.). Retrieved June 10, 2017 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finding_aid
Greene, M. A. & Meissner, D. (2005). More product, less process: Revamping traditional archival processing. The American Archivist, 68(2), 208-263.
Millar, L. (2017). Archives: Principles and practices (2nd ed.). New York, NY: ALA Neal Schuman.