Learn how to use Finding Aids to efficiently navigate archival collections and locate specific materials. This guide shows how these tools can streamline your research process.
Transcript
One of the most exciting things about working with materials in Special Collections and Archives is conducting original research using archival collections.
Whether you explore the records of a business or organization, or the personal papers of an individual, these collections will be organized in boxes filled with folders containing many many documents.
They may consist of one or several boxes.
In fact, one of our largest collections, The Howard Cannon Papers, consists of over 800 boxes.
Typically, your research will not require you to examine the contents of every box in a collection.
So how can you determine what is in an archival collection and where in that collection you might find what you are looking for?
Just as an index or table of contents provides a guide to what’s inside of a book, the Finding Aid is a tool that provides researchers with detailed information on the contents of an archival collection.
Created by our professional archivist, our Finding Aids follow a standard format and include both administrative and descriptive information about the collection as a whole, and a detailed inventory of the boxes and/or folders in the collection.
To give you an idea of how they work, let’s take a closer look at some Finding Aids for a few different collections in our archives.
Each Finding Aid will have a title page, and a table of contents like this one for the Ortiz Family Collection on the Las Vegas 51s Baseball Team.
The Summary Information section includes important data such as the collection number, title, and the date span of the materials that make up the collection.
The Abstract gives you a broad overview of the collection, while the Preferred Citation section helps you cite the material correctly in your paper or presentation.
The Finding Aid also provides a brief Historical Note relevant to the materials in this case it is information about the Las Vegas 51s Baseball Team.
The Scope and Content Note provides a broad overview of the subject matter and themes found in the collection.
Many people skip over the Arrangement and Administrative information section, but it is useful to know the publication rights information if you are planning to use the collection for a publication.
Whereas the previous sections give you a broad understanding of the overall collection and its history, the listings in the Collection Inventory section are where you connect your particular research query to the information found in the collection.
Listings are either at the box level, like these, or are more detailed and describe the contents of individual folders found in a particular box like these.
Interested in seeing a box of Las Vegas Media Guides from the 2000s?
Looking at the Finding Aid tells us that we will need to request Box 8.
Let’s look at some other Finding Aids which may provide more detail on the contents of the collection.
For instance — the Finding Aid for Union Pacific Railroad Collection with 163 boxes and 55 flat files of material, is one of the largest archival collections we have.
Not surprisingly, the Finding Aid is much longer, nearly 300 pages, because the inventory is describing many more folders and boxes of documents.
As in the previous example, our Summary Information provides important dates and size info, an Abstract, and a Preferred Citation.
In this example, the Organizational History is much longer and more detailed because of the importance of the Union Pacific Railroad and its long history in Las Vegas.
The Scope and Contents Note is also lengthy due to the size of the collection and as we look at the Arrangements Note, we see that the collection is divided into series and subseries, which help us to understand how the materials are arranged topically, and which series might assist us in finding the documents we might need for our research.
In many cases, the series arrangement matches the organization of the company.
Our Finding Aids are available online as pdfs on the Special Collections & Archives website or as hard copies for you to consult when you visit our reading room in person.
The advantage to an online Finding Aid is that you can use Control F to search for specific keywords and phrases to locate items in a particularly long inventory like the one in the Union Pacific Railroad Collection Finding Aid.
In a digital copy of a Finding Aid, you can also click on links to digitized items directly from the inventory.
For instance — here’s a Finding Aid for the personal papers of Jerry Jackson where you can click on links to items like costume and set designs.
Keep in mind however, that only a small number of collections have been fully digitized so you will still have to visit in person to view most material in Special Collections and Archives.
Our Finding Aids will help you prepare for your visit in advance by knowing which boxes you will need to request for your research as well as provide you a better historical understanding of the collections you are exploring.
