Week 6: Description of the Ruth Engs papers

Now that all of the separate files and items in the Ruth Engs papers have been physically arranged in order, the next task in the project is to create the finding aid.  Basically, an archival finding aid is a document designed to communicate the nature and usefulness of the collection to a potential archives user.  In order to do this, a finding aid will include narrative biographical information about person whose papers are being preserved, a narrative description of the scope and content of the collection, and a list of all of the folders or items in the collection.  In the case of the records of an organization, the biographical section will discuss the history of the organization.  Finding aids also contain some other basic information, including the size of the collection, the date span, and subject terms used to describe the collection. 

Here is the SAA Glossary definition of a finding aid, which provides a similar basic description of these documents. To get a better idea of what a finding aid is, check out this page which allows one to browse all finding aids for archival collections held at IU.

The IU Archives creates all of its finding aids using EAD, or Encoded Archival Description, which is a standard for creating finding aids using XML.  A primary benefit of putting finding aids online using this standard is that it can improve the ability of a patron to find specific archival material of interest.  For more information about EAD, here is the Wikipedia entry on EAD and the official EAD homepage.

At the IU Archives, EAD finding aids are created based on initial finding aids that are created by the processor after the arranging of the collection.  These initial documents are created in Microsoft Word, and then, once the Word document has been complete, the information is plugged into the XML document.  At the moment, it is the creation of this initial finding aid that I am working on at the archives for the Ruth Engs papers.  The process is pretty straightforward; I am completing a list that includes the name of every folder or item contained within the collection in the order in which they appear in the boxes.  This container list includes indicates the names of series and subseries and also indicates the physical breakdown of the collection by box number.  Once I finish the container list, I will complete the narrative sections of the finding aid which provide biographical and contextual information about Ruth Engs and her papers.