Individual Article:
Online finding aids facilitate access to archival collections
New technology has increased awareness of a long-established, yet sometimes overlooked research source. The neologism “archive,” referring to stored digital information, has raised the profile of the venerable term “archives” (a repository of unique, primary source materials), making it new again—and almost cool. Technology has also increased access to archives, making it simpler to locate and use those elusive, one-of-a kind primary sources such as manuscripts, correspondence, and diaries.
But because archival materials are as unique as their creators, and collections vary widely in content and organization, they are cataloged differently from published sources and cannot be identified through the more familiar forms of online book and journal searching. Finding aids (also called guides or descriptive inventories) are the key to locating archival materials. A typical finding aid functions like the index or table of contents in a book and includes a description of a collection, explains its organization, and outlines its contents, most often as a list of the folder titles in each box.
Finding aids were formerly paper documents that were available only on site. Other means of access to archival collections included catalog records and published union guides—neither of which typically included the full finding aids. To locate a specific archival collection, or for specific materials in various collections, researchers used to have to guess at the existence or location of a collection, or rely on citations in published works. Now WorldCat includes records of archival collections; and other resources are being developed specifically to guide researchers to primary sources. ArchivesUSA is one of the oldest electronic databases of archival collections. Its records, representing repositories all over the country, can be searched by keyword, but, like WorldCat or OPAC records, they do not include the complete finding aid.
Several types of web-mounted finding aids can now be located using a Google search.
The University Archives and Special Collections have made many of their finding aids available in searchable PDF format in recent years. New union databases, such as California’s Online Archive of California and Northwestern’s (still prototypical) Archival Collections portal, contain finding aids that have been formatted in Encoded Archival Description (EAD). EAD lets the researcher use familiar library-style terms to search throughout all the finding aids in the database (in one repository or across multiple repositories) and locate likely resources. ArchiveGrid, a new electronic resource coming soon to the Library, uses a simple search method to search across thousands of repositories; the results may include anything from a one-line description of a collection to a full finding-aid.
In most cases, finding aids do not link to digitized materials. This is an especially important point to make when discussing them with students, who increasingly expect easy, click-through access to the information they seek. Like an index, finding aids identify a likely source of information, after which researchers still must contact the archives to obtain more information, request copies, or plan a research trip to examine the documents. But researchers around the world have been able to locate archival materials online that they never would have found by the limited methods previously available. They would agree that finding the finding aid is an exciting giant step to finding the unique primary sources they seek.
Janet C. Olson
University Archives