As a late-adopter, I tend to run into a very annoying problem. Whenever I get comfortable with a piece of technology, something else comes onto the market to replace it. For example, pagers gave way to cell phones, and then cell phones morphed into has-everything-but-the-kitchen-sink phones. Even laptops seem to be less popular due to netbooks (because after all, who needs anything else but the Internet?) While it's unlikely that these things will disappear forever, obsolescence happens. That's why there are computer museums that have dusty old technology on which to extract information from those ancient 3.5 floppy disks.
A recent thread on the SAA listserv (when I say recent, I mean a week or two ago--I'm really not all that up to the minute here) questioned the obsolescence of finding aids. Just reading the title of the thread made me sad. Although finding aids can come in HTML or searchable web formats (called Encoded Archival Description, a web encoding standard), as collections become available online, they become searchable within databases that seem, on the surface, to make finding aids superfluous. At least, that is how I understand the argument against finding aids. However, there is greater support for them and I was heartened by all of the strong reasons for how they still play a vital role in archives presented by other professionals on the listserv.
Why would the loss of finding aids make me sad? What is a finding aid? Well, like its name suggests, the finding aid is a document that aids the researcher in finding the material he or she needs. Or, to be more official, according the Society of American Archivists glossary, a finding aid is “a tool that facilitates discovery of information within a collection of records, or a description of records that gives the repository physical and intellectual control over the materials and that assists users to gain access to and understand the materials.” It can come in many formats, such as indexes, inventories, and calendars. I often compare it with a catalog entry in a library, but it is so much more.
A great thing about a finding aid is that it provides context to a collection of materials, so that it’s more than just a box or boxes of papers and objects with no sense of where they originated and how they were used. My favorite form of finding aid is a document that provides everything from how the collection was acquired, the biographical history of the creator, and notes on arrangement to a sometimes detailed description of what is in each box and even in each folder. I say sometimes because the extent of a finding aid will really be determined by the extent of the arrangement of the collection. The more detailed the arrangement (i.e. arranged item by item versus arranged by groups of items), the more detailed the description. The arrangement and description aspect of processing is really where creativity and archival theory meet, and the finding aid is the result.
The creation of finding aids is one of the tasks to which I look forward when I get my first archival job. I’ve written a few, some for fun and some to be used in an archives. The most recent one I created was of the fun variety for a collection of family photos I scanned for my siblings. I determined that the best way to describe the photos was just as an inventory of the files. I could have created folders for each time period, or specific sibling, but the inventory was more expedient. The language of the biographical history and such is meant to be light and not necessarily reflective of a more professional example, but the format is very similar (although different institutions will likely each have its own template).
While I look at finding aids in terms of writing one, of processing a collection, of doing the research to give that collection context and background, the most important thing about them is what it does for the researcher. It's a guide to the complex cultural and social history of the human race. It's very cool.
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