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The evolution of the finding aid in the United States: from physical to digital document genre

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Abstract

In this article, we examine the American finding aid as a form of genre from both a cognitive and a sociological perspective and use this analysis to articulate some of the hidden or underlying regularities and assumptions of archives work. As finding aids increasingly are created and delivered digitally, we can anticipate tensions in the form and use of these genres giving rise to increased scrutiny of archival practices that in turn should cause us to explore the representation of the archives profession in a digital world. A particular focus of this article is to advance an argument that for too long, the actual consumption and use, that is, the reading of finding aids, has been ignored or overlooked. Yet, it is likely that only through understanding how people exploit and read these documents in real use can we improve their design. In so doing, we make a case for archival research to move further into the analysis of user behavior, information seeking, and contemporary information practices so as to improve and extend the appreciation of how archives contribute to the larger information field.

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Notes

  1. Calendars are defined as “lists of documents included in an archival collection… usually annotated to include the date, contents, and other characteristics of each item” (Reitz 2004). Explanations of the term “guide,” “inventory,” and “register” are provided by Tweedale. Guides are descriptive lists created to acquaint researchers with a repository’s holdings or a portion of the holdings related to a specific area or period. In the United States, the inventory was developed largely as an internal document by the National Archives to describe its record groups. A refinement of the inventory, the register, was developed by the American Library of Congress in the 1950s and consists of a more detailed description of a collection than that given in a catalog entry and, in addition, includes a note about the arrangement of a collection (Tweedale 1976). The difference between an index and a catalog has been explained by Schellenberg. “Indexes are designed merely to point the way to subject content, to indicate where information on subjects may be found in records. They are not designed to describe records, as are catalogs, but only to identify them in relation to subjects. Indexes are thus locating media; catalogs are descriptive media, through they too, obviously, may be used to locate information” (Schellenberg 1965, p. 273).

  2. The term “arrangement” came into common use following the US National Archives’ introduction of the Record Group concept in 1941 (Stapleton 1985).

  3. In an international context, such work has included the study of users’ opinions on the content and format of displays in archival information systems (Duff and Stoyanova 1998), as well as the study of the retrieval side of intellectual access to archival materials (Zhang and Kamps 2010).

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  1. School of Information, The University of Texas at Austin, 1616 Guadalupe Suite #5.202, Austin, TX, 78701-1213, USA

    Ciaran B. Trace & Andrew Dillon

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  1. Ciaran B. Trace
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Correspondence to Ciaran B. Trace.

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Trace, C.B., Dillon, A. The evolution of the finding aid in the United States: from physical to digital document genre. Arch Sci 12, 501–519 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-012-9190-5

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