Arrangement & description, also called "processing," is an archival function that is the often necessary link between the acquisition of new collections and our making those collections effectively accessible to researchers. Many newly acquired collections arrive at the AHC (as at all repositories) with little or no discernable order to the material-sometimes hundreds of boxes of such disorganized material. On the one hand its current state is such that a researcher would have to be lucky to find any particular documents or information in the collection; on the other hand if such collections were given too meticulous an organization-or their contents described in too much detail-it would take so long to "process" the collection that researchers would have to wait years.
Arrangement and description results in published catalog records and inventories about collections that are intended to make the collections usable to researchers. For more information on our collections, or to view our catalog records and inventories, please visit the Collections area of this site.
For more information, contact Claudia Thompson.
