Chapter 4: Providing Intellectual Access to Archives

The arrangement and description of archives aids in the ability of the reference archivist to provide access to users and allows for the discovery of collections housed in the archive.

Archivists follow the principles of provenance and original order in organizing and arranging records. These principles are grounded in the contextual information that made the records usable as they were created.

Provenance links records to the functions that created them. Provenance is retains for the very important reason of ensuring that the evidence in the records is authentic.

Description is another important process that aids in intellectual access. Description functions as the information that guides users to records and helps user understand those records. To provide better access for users repositories create guides and finding aids that describe collections and records series’. These finding aids can be produced in a myriad of methods. EAD is becoming the most popular as it allows for the archive to mount their finding aids on the Internet, which allows for even greater discovery and use. Finding aids can be just paper publications that are as simple as a repository directory or as detailed as an EAD finding aid.

Archivists use a variety of finding aids, which continue to evolve as new technologies are developed, to provide intellectual access to users about the holdings and collections of an archive. Reference archivists provide a crucial link between these finding aids and the users seeking information. It is always important to remember that description and finding aids are not created just for those working within the archive, rather they are meant to aid users in finding the information they are seeking. It is easy to lose sight of the end user while arranging and describing a collection, but a user's needs must always be considered. Reference archivists take the end product of archivists and enable users to find those collections and gather the information needed.