Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Using Archives: A Guide to Effective Research
The Society of American Archivists offers this overview on effective research in archives for those without prior archival research experience. This guide provides general information and is not specific to SCRC. You will find information on:
PRIMARY SOURCES
Primary sources are the building blocks of history. They are records created by individuals and organizations that provide first hand, contemporaneous accounts of an event or topic. Primary sources can also be eyewitness testimony, recollections recorded in an oral history, memoirs, and autobiographies.
Primary sources comprise the bulk of the material in the University Archives and includes, but not limited to:
SECONDARY SOURCES
Secondary sources are not created contemporaneously to an event or topic. They are created using primary sources and include resources such as textbooks, monographs, journal articles, biographies, commentaries, reviews, and criticisms. The secondary sources found in University Archives include publications within faculty papers, histories on Southern Illinois University, and student dissertations, theses, and research papers.
The catalog record for archival collections are called Finding Aids. These help researchers know about a collection's creator, what types of materials and topics can be found, and how the collection is organized. This section will explain the most important parts. Below is a screen shot from ArchivEra, our finding aid database, showing a section of the Open Court Publishing Company records finding aid.
The collection number and title appear at the top, in this case MSS 027 and Open Court Publishing Company Records.
Finding aids often identify and provide biographical and historical information about the Creator(s), in this case the Open Court Publishing Company and Paul Carus. Information about the Creator(s) can provide contextual information important for understanding the collection's content, such as the "by who," "where," and "why" the records were created.
The Scope and Content note is typically 1-3 paragraphs describing the collection itself including topics covered, date spans, record formats, subjects, and (sometimes) how the collection has been physically organized. Information on how the collection is organized can also be found in the Archival Arrangement field.
Finding aids include subject headings (not shown above) that function the same way as they do in the library's book and journal databases. Clicking on a term will show all collections with that term. The Subject field follows the Scope and Content field in ArchivEra.
The Language field identifies the language(s) in which the collection's content are created. The Dates field indicates the date range of the entire collection, while Predominant Dates indicates the timespan of the majority of the collection. The Extent is the collection size.
The screen shot below continues the Open Court Publishing Company Records finding aid.
The Preferred Citation field is our suggested basic format for citing primary sources from a collection. Identifying the item often includes noting its box and folder numbers. Citation styles such as Chicago Manual of Style, APA, and MLA have their own formatting. Your style will depend on your professor's preference.
The "composed of" section provides an inventory of the collection content. Many collections are organized into Series while some simply have a box and folder container list. The above screen shot shows the first two (of 9) series in the Open Court Publishing Company Records. A Series is a grouping of records that share a common theme which can be topical or can reflect a record format, in this case Correspondence and Manuscripts. A series can have its own Scope and Content and date range that describes its content in greater detail than the collection-level Scope and Content. Sometimes a Series is further grouped into Sub-series but this is less common. By clicking on a Series link you will see a list of boxes that you can click on to view the folders in each box. The screen shot below is the folder inventory of box 50 in the "Paul Carus manuscripts" sub-series within the Manuscripts series.
Provenance means "the origin or source of something." In most cases, a collection's provenance is simply the person(s) or organization(s) that created it. The principle of provenance says that records of difference origins be kept separate to preserve their context. In other words, the papers of Darwin Reid Payne are maintained separately from the papers of Mordecai Gorelik, despite both being former SIU theater professors.
Original order refers to "the organization and sequence of records established by the creator of the records." The principle of original dictates that archival arrangement should attempt to preserve the creator's organizational scheme as best as possible. Archivist impose order when no discernable order exists.
Provenance and original order are essential for preserving the context of how and why a person or organization created, organized, maintained, and used their records. A record removed from its filing system or disconnected from its creator is difficult to interpret!
Archivists call these components levels of description. The level to which a collection is arranged and described varies from collection to collection. All collections have a collection level description that describes the collection as a whole. The example above is the collection level description of the Open Court Publishing Company Records finding aid. Collections may be arranged and described into smaller units such as series, sub-series, file, and item.
Collection - a group of materials with some unifying characteristic, the most common of which being created by and/or acquired from a specific person or organization. The collection is the first level of description and typically includes titles, dates, creator(s), creator(s) biographical/historical notes, scope and content note, subject terms, access restrictions, and acquisition information about the collection as a whole.
Series - collections may be arranged into series, which are groups of records arranged according to a filing system and share something in common, such as the activity that created them, a topic, or record format (e.g. annual reports, correspondence, etc.). Series are described with title, date, and often a scope and content note. They can be divided further into sub-series. Not all collections are grouped into series; many finding aids skip the series level and contain collection level description with a list of described files.
File - series are comprised of individual files, which are groups of documents related by use or topic, typically housed in a folder. Files are described with title, dates, and occasionally a scope and content note. The file level is often the lowest level to which a collection is arranged and described.
Item - a thing (i.e. record) that can be distinguished from a group and that is complete in itself. Items, which are most often the individual papers, comprise the contents of a file. Collections are rarely described to the item level.