Arranging and Describing Archives and Manuscripts
Arranging and Describing Archives and Manuscripts
Arranging and Describing Archives and Manuscripts
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this series, but is worth revisiting in other forums. Should we continue to train
archivists and processing staff in traditional finding aid design if the finding aid
itself (in its totality) is no longer useful to our users?
New, efficient processing methodologies focusing on immediate access to
materials heighten the challenges to context in online finding aid databases.
At their finest, as Meissner describes, these methodologies result in well-artic-
ulated intellectual arrangement of materials as expressed through descriptive
finding aids brimming with contextual information, typically leaving the physi-
cal reality of the records or papers in original order and housing (p. 23). Under
older processing methodologies, materials would be physically rearranged to
reflect their intellectual ordering and to introduce context, meaning research-
ers would be able to infer a certain level of context from the materials colocated
with files within a box. Today’s efficient methods do not introduce that mirrored
aspect of physical and intellectual arrangement, which represents another lost
opportunity for researchers to infer or directly learn critical contextuality for
collections. Meissner details these efficient processing methods clearly and well
in the volume, but he does not caution readers about their potential impact on
the research process of our users. I would have liked him to address this tension
in this book as it is fundamental to our profession today.
A second, somewhat glaring, absence in this volume is the lack of atten-
tion to socially conscious and inclusive description practices—which are given
a nod in the “Emerging Trends and Theoretical Shifts” chapter, but not incor-
porated as a foundational principle for how archivists seek to describe archival
materials. The movement toward more inclusive and equitable description prac-
tices is certainly not new, nor is it emerging. It is the culmination of more than
a decade of work, and the wealth of community-generated controlled vocabu-
laries that have developed over the last few years, as well as the theoretical
grounding, should have been presented as fundamental to the practice of archi-
val description, in my opinion.
Reparative description, a critical extension of inclusive and equitable
description practices, could have been put forward as more of an “emerging
trend.” There is a vigorous, ongoing discussion about this very topic in the
profession, and the lack of mention in this publication is startling. Perhaps
Meissner chose to not include it because it is not universally accepted prac-
tice, but I feel that his authoritative perspective on arrangement and descrip-
tion would be uniquely valuable as we consider opportunities for expanding
traditional description practices. As theory evolves, the Archival Fundamentals
Series has an obligation to make definitive statements and codify practice. This
volume could have presented a major opportunity for codifying certain initia-
tives in socially conscious description, and I am saddened to see the work of so
many reduced to an “emerging trend.”
Notes
1
Rachel Walton, “Looking for Answers: A Usability Study of Online Finding Aid Navigation,”
American Archivist 80, no. 1 (2017): 30–52, https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.80.1.30.
2
See Dennis Meissner, “First Things First: Reengineering Finding Aids for Implementation of EAD,”
American Archivist 60, no. 4 (1997): 372–87, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.60.4.6405275227647220.
3
TS-DACS has moved toward a continuous improvement model, leveraging GitHub for ongoing
requests for change to principles and standards, alike. This new approach diverges from previous
practice of codifying DACS in a publication that would be reviewed periodically.
4
Meissner does mention “challenges to original order” in his “Emerging Trends” chapter (p. 144),
but this change to the DACS principles is not referenced in his writing on the topic.
5
Society of American Archivists’ Technical Subcommittee on Describing Archives: A Content Standard
(TS-DACS), Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS) (2019). Most up-to-date documentation is
available on GitHub at https://github.com/saa-ts-dacs/dacs.