Manuscript Finding Aids

About Finding Aids

What is a finding aid?

A finding aid is a tool created by librarians and archivists to provide information about the arrangement, content and context of an archival collection. Archival collections consist of materials formed by a person, family, or organisation. They may contain a wide variety of material such as correspondence, diaries, manuscripts, speeches, newspaper cuttings, photographs, cassette tapes, computer files, pamphlets and memorabilia. Finding aids assist researchers to locate efficiently materials relevant to their research in large and diverse collections.

How to understand finding aids

Finding aids often consist of numerous hierarchies. These hierarchies are used to illustrate the relationships of items or files to higher levels of organisation.

At the highest level, finding aids provide an overview of the collection. The overview may include information on the scope, content and size of the collection, how the collection was acquired, the conditions under which it may be accessed and copied, and how it may be cited. A biographical or organisational history may also be provided, as well as information on related collections held within the Library and elsewhere.

Lower down the hierarchy are progressively detailed descriptions of the parts or components of the collection. Many finding aids are organised into series or subseries which divide the records according to their physical form or the activities for which they were created or assembled. Series may reflect the groupings or file systems used by the creator when the files were in active use, or may have been imposed later by Library staff. A series description may be provided to summarise the contents of a series.

Below the series level may be inventories of files or items which comprise the series, together with corresponding series numbers, container numbers, or other means for researchers to identify and request the physical entities of interest to them. The inventory may be in numerical, alphabetical, chronological or some other order. Some finding aids include indexes to correspondence which identify the authors and recipients of all correspondence in a particular series of collection.

 

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