If it’s your first time interacting with an archive, archival arrangement can be intimidating.
However, the most important thing to know is that archives are arranged hierarchically. This means that the descriptions at each level get more specific as you move down. This also means that information relating to the higher levels, like the date range in a file title, will apply to the lower level–in this case, the items in the file.
The tabs in this section will help to further clarify what each of the levels of arrangement means.
Archives are not arranged by topic, but by Collections (also sometimes called Fonds or Records Groups, which are more common in government archives).
A collection is made up of at least two objects that share provenance. Provenance means that all of the documents somehow came from the same entity (i.e. a person or organization), usually because the entity originally created the item or because the item was in their possession.
An example of what this could look like is if you donated the contents of your camera roll to an archive. Some of those photos are photos where you were the direct creator because you were the photographer. Meanwhile, some photos are things you had no hand in creating. This could be things you screenshotted from social media or photos your friends took and texted to you. Both the photos that you created and the photos created by others would result in a collection named after you, since they share the provenance or the shared origin of your camera roll. So, when you’re starting out with your research, it is important to ask both, “who made this?” as well as “who might have ended up with a copy?” Because collections can contain the records the entity created, as well as copies of records the entity kept.
Collections can also be artificially assembled. This means that items in the collection might not share a provenance, but rather a shared topic. For example, someone could create an artificial collection on 2020 internet culture. To make this collection, they might pull memes or screenshotted social media posts that appeared in your camera roll and add them to other screenshots saved on a classmate’s shared camera roll. That collection no longer has a shared provenance, but rather a shared topic. Artificial collections are not super common in contemporary archival practice, but you might bump into it. If a collection is artificial, it should be noted somewhere in the finding aid.
When collections are larger, an archivist may break them down into series. Series are usually thought of as splitting up the records based on a person or organization’s activities. For example, if a famous author donated all of their papers, an archivist might choose to split it into a series on their personal life, which might contain letters from their friends and photos of family events, and a series on their writing career, which would contain their drafts, letters to their editor and publisher, story outlines, and other items produced while working on their writing.
A series can then be broken down into subseries to be even more specific. For example, the series on the author’s writing might be broken down into a subseries for a specific genre they wrote in, the type of materials (drafts, letters, etc.) in the subseries, or periods of time.
Within series and subseries, there are files. Files offer an even more detailed way to describe the collection. So, within a subseries on the author’s correspondences to their editor and publisher, there might be a file on their correspondences concerning a particular short story.
Files can also exist outside of series or subseries. For example, if a collection is small enough, it may not fall under a series or subseries. Instead, the organization will jump straight to files.
Files can only belong to one series or subseries at a time and are usually the smallest unit listed in a finding aid (discussed more in a later section). It won't tell you the individual items in the collection, but it should give you a pretty specific idea of what might be in the file.
Unlike the more abstract categories listed above, items are the singular, physical things that are contained in the File. If we continue with our example of the file of correspondences for a particular story in the author’s collection, an item in that file would be a letter.
It is very rare that an archive documents the individual items in a finding aid, so learning what items are in a collection is usually up to the individual researcher’s curiosity and research.
