Introduction | Explore a Box - Activity | Read a Finding Aid - Prep | Read a Finding Aid - Activity

Definition of a finding aid (5 minutes)

“A description of records that gives the repository physical and intellectual control over the materials. This helps users gain access to and understand the materials. This often contains a textual description of the material and a list of where the material is housed.”

Find this definition in ALL ABOUT: Archive Terms, a brief glossary of the terms you will encounter most often in archival finding aids.

Understand the context (10 minutes)

Context is key to understanding archival collections and the finding aids that describe them.

Archivists are trained to pay attention to context and to describe things in aggregate. We work with groups of material that can be a few boxes or hundreds of boxes, and we need to bring the same kind of descriptive skills to each.

Throughout this module, we will be referencing readings from Finding Your Way Through Finding Aids: Archives 101. Feel free to explore all of these readings now, or in parts as you move through each task.

Investigate like an archivist

Read “The Archive? Our Archives” section of What is an archive? What is a finding aid? to get a general overview of how archival collections come to be.

There are some basic questions archivists ask.

Most of these questions will translate into the basic data points found in a catalog record or in a more detailed finding aid. They’re also good entry points for you to understand more about the collection you explored in Explore a Box- Activity.

Who created or collected this material?
Who gave the material to the archive?
What state was the material in before it came to the archive?
What kinds of things are in the collection? e.g. diaries, account books, press releases, correspondence, photographs, etc.
How many boxes, volumes, etc. are there?
What subjects, people, time periods are documented in the collection? e.g. not just “Emily Dickinson poems” but “poems written while she was ten years old”

What you’ll find - and what’s missing

Finding aids are great at guiding you to the location of archival collections.

They give you an overview of the content, but they won't necessarily have all the information you need or want. Sometimes the finding aid omits information that might feel important to you. These omissions could be for reasons including historical practice, staff time, or differing ideas of what matters.

To understand why, read more about types of description, archival silences, and archival neutrality in What’s in a Finding Aid and What’s Not.

Introduction | Explore a Box - Activity | Read a Finding Aid - Prep | Read a Finding Aid - Activity