Course Context & Sources

This post was originally written as a discussion response for INFO 256 with Instructor Erin Lawrimore at San José State University in Fall 2026. It has been republished on my personal blog for the purpose of revisiting and sharing my learning.

The response was written in response to a discussion prompt provided by the Instructor and draws on the course readings and materials listed below.

Discussion prompt:

Where to start?!? You have just been hired by a small college which has never had an archivist before. The institution has collected approximately 100 collections from alumni and other donors. Currently, the only information available for these materials is a card catalog entry, containing title, approximate date range, date of acquisition, and a one-sentence description of the records. What additional information do you need in order to start making these records available to researchers?

Course readings and sources:

Lawrimore, Erin. “Module #3: Archival Arrangement and Description.” 2026

Course:

INFO 256: Archives and Manuscripts, San José State University, Fall 2026, Instructor: Erin Lawrimore

Note: The views and analysis expressed in this post are my own unless otherwise attributed. Course prompts and instructional materials belong to their respective authors and are reproduced only as necessary to provide context for my response.

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Response

To make these records available to researchers, we need to arrange and describe the collections received from alumni and other donors.

For arrangement, we can follow three steps: grouping, ordering, and physical housing. First, we can review each collection separately to maintain provenance, or the relationship between the records and their creator. This review would involve identifying the series within each collection and noting their formats (e.g., journals, photographs, and correspondence) and functions (e.g., legal, business, or personal records).

• After identifying how the records are grouped, we can examine the original order, which is the way the creator organized the records (if such an order exists). Where the original order is unclear or insufficient, we can establish an arrangement from series that provide the most insight into the creator to those that have least insight about the creator.
• Once each collection has an intellectual arrangement, the materials can be physically rehoused in archival-quality folders and boxes. This process can prioritize materials that are particularly vulnerable to deterioration, based on the repository’s priorities and policies.

For description, the archivist will need to create an accurate representation of each collection through a finding aid. The finding aid can incorporate information gathered during arrangement as well as information from the existing card catalog entry.

• It should identify the creator of the records, the title of the collection, its date range, extent or quantity, and the contents and organization of the collection. Additional information, such as historical or biographical context, physical characteristics, subject or access terms, and administrative information can also be included when available and useful to researchers.

Because the college has approximately 100 collections, the archivist should establish a processing plan that considers the size and complexity of each collection and allocates an appropriate amount of time to each one. This would help ensure that the collections are processed systematically while preventing a significant backlog due to uneven level of arrangement by collections.

Once the collections have been arranged and described, their finding aids can be incorporated into the college’s existing search systems or archival database so researchers can discover and understand the collections. Staff should also be trained in the procedures and policies for maintaining the collections and providing access to researchers.