Finding aids have long been an essential part of archivists’ work. To create a finding aid is to create a surrogate of an archival collection. Multiple levels of description are used to distill information about the unique groupings and parts of a collection and to place its content into context. Archivists make decisions about what to include in a finding aid based on their own judgment as trained professionals, but also with the intent to create a finding aid that will be genuinely helpful to researchers. Indeed, as the revised principles of Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS) state: “Users are the fundamental reason for archival description… To make wise choices about descriptive practices, archivists must develop and maintain an awareness of user needs and behaviors.” The practical challenge facing archivists is knowing what users will find helpful. Although archivists often seek to center users in their processes of description, these efforts are often based on guesses concerning what users will find useful. Very little research has been done to understand how users read and navigate archival description; there is a distinct disconnect between the intention of centering users and carrying out usability or user studies to under user needs. This study is intended to advance our understanding on this matter, responding to two questions: Do researchers use collection or series level notes valued by archivists, such as scope and content and arrangement notes, in order to understand what is in a collection? Or, do users rely mostly on information found at lower levels, describing what might be in a single file or the content of a single item? And, working in the post "MPLP" context, if granular description is not available in a finding aid, are users able to ascertain what is in a collection and if it is relevant to their search?

The California Digital Library has announced a $982,175 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS – National Leadership Grants for Libraries grant program) to conduct a tw…

A4BLiP affirms the importance of making history and archives accessible to folks of all races, genders, and abilities. However, we know that many archives’ catalogs and finding aids, especially tho…

Author(s): Allison-Bunnell, Jodi | Editor(s): Turner, Adrian

Good example of description for digital materials inside a finding aid.

Putting born-digital stuff, including disk images, into finding aids.

In our posts on what archivists do and on what it’s like to visit the archives, we promised you a closer look at how archivists organize collections. Here it is: we hope this post demystifies some …

Anyone doing archival research will eventually find themselves using archival descriptions. Archival descriptions are embodied in what are often called “finding aids.” They are the archival world’s…

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen that the task I set out for myself this week was to devise a way to describe web archives using the tools available to me: Archivists’ Toolkit, …

This is a talk that I gave at the Radcliffe Workshop on Technology and Archival Processing on April 3, 2014. I hope you enjoy what I had to say. I think it dovetails nicely with the work the four o…

On discovery breaking out of the prison of original order via linked data and digitization.

"This article explores the idea of coupling robust collection-level descriptions to mass digitization and optical character recognition to provide full-text search of unprocessed and backlogged modern collections, bypassing archival processing and the creation of finding aids."

by Oliver W. Holmes (1964) [Note on Web Version] Archives are already arranged -- supposedly. That is to say, an arrangement was given them by the agency of origin while it built them up day after

Aviation Safety and Security Archives at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Prescott, Arizona, Campus