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Introduction

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As your collections grow, it may be necessary to begin to provide more metadata and descriptions to aid viewers in locating and understanding what they are engaging with and perusing.

A finding aid (or guide) is a document that assists in systematically describing and organizing series and folders in collections for patrons and archivists alike. It may be a tool for you to begin to implement for your archive that builds off the work you have already done.

The majority of the content in a finding aid is metadata and information you have previously documented. In this format, it is repurposed along with additional sections to be a sort of descriptive inventory and map for people to use for a given collection.

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Narrowing down the range that your finding aid will cover is dependent on the collection's own organization. You want to be able to accurately describe the contents without overfilling and providing too many details to be useful. It will be helpful to ensure that there are no floating documents or unfiled, unprocessed materials that should be organized within existing categories and that your categories themselves are clearly defined.

Consistency Across Series and Collections

While finding aids do not tend to span across collections, they do contextualize and describe series within a given collection.

You need to make sure that filenames and labels are consistent across series and folders. Regularity in naming assists in navigation and makes locations more predictable for people trying to understand the organizational structure.

If a series describes numerical entries, someone would not expect to find that all contents within are actually labelled with a mix or numbers and letters in some unsystematic way (e.g. 120aee-Ben.wav, 124aee-BC.wav, 02aea-B.wav versus A0013-BC.wav, A0014-BC.wav, A0015-KF.wav).

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Communication

As you may have many people working at once on your DiGI project, it is also important to communicate when creating your finding aids.

If the contents, arrangement, and other important factors are changing inside the collection, you will be playing catch-up while making the aid.

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Digitization has provided the two draft templates found within the module on this page for easy access. Finding aids can take many forms. The DiGI Team-created version is an Excel Spreadsheet; the Sustainable Heritage Network (SHN) template is a Word Document. You can use either as a basis for creating finding aids for your current and future collections.

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For more information about the SHN and their resources, including a tutorial for their finding aid template, please see their site here at the Sustainable Heritage Network.