Doing Archival Research in Political Science By Scott A. Frisch, ...

Once the decision is made to preserve a collection, the next step (usually before providing access) is to describe the collection. It is the role of the archivist to create order out of chaos—that is, to process the collection. An archivist needs to survey the collection to gain an understanding of the scope of the collection (e.g., what years it covers and what topics are represented in the records). From a researcher’s point of view, this is important for determining whether material in the collection might be useful for a research project. Usually an archivist will also summarize the contents and report the provenance of the collection, or how it was generated and how it arrived in the repository.

Collections are rarely in an order that makes them easy for researchers to use. Boxes and files are not neatly arranged for easy access. An archivist is responsible for processing a collection. This involves (to a greater or lesser extent) putting boxes and files together into topical order—that is, arranging like materials into groups or series. The degree to which archivists impose order—often chronological—on a collection is a matter of scholarly debate within their field, but imposing some order is the result of arranging the materials.

Archivists are also responsible for creating a finding aid: a written list of the records that helps the researcher in locating materials within a collection of documents. At a minimum, a finding aid will describe the kinds of documents that are included in each box. Finer-grained finding aids will list the titles of the folders in each box (usually titles that were on the original folders or titles that the archivist assigns to a folder), providing some insight into the documents within the folder. In some cases (the best case from the researcher’s perspective), archivists will add further description of the documents contained in the folder.

Once a collection is processed, it is made available to researchers. Access to the records is controlled by the archivist, subject to the policies of the repository and the donor’s restrictions. The archivist is now the vital link between the researcher and the subject of the research.