Archives in PA: Using Catalogs and Finding Aids

One of the most challenging jobs for archivists — professional or volunteer — is cataloging their collections. Every item needs to be given a title or name, creator, date, location, and at least some short description. When materials arrive at an archive, they rarely come with a full history of why they were created and by whom and for what purpose. Archivists are continually challenged by how to describe their collections.

To understand the complexity, let's compare collections in archives to published books in libraries.

Published books, housed in libraries, come to the library with title, category, author, and creation date already established by the publisher. Books also have short descriptions called "blurbs" describing their contents on the back cover. Librarians can quickly add new books to their collections, and everything is easily searchable by title, author, category, and description. In addition, published books are organized the same way in every library in the country. You will not find Stephen King's epic horror novel Children of the Corn in fiction in one library, and in history in another.

Let's cover how archives are organized and an approach to using them by developing a research profile.

How Archives are Organized 

Each archive develops its own organization system to best preserve and access its specific collections. While national organizations, such at the Society of Archivists, recommend standards and practices, it is ultimately up to each archive to decide what they collect and how to catalog it. Researchers will find a broad spectrum across our institutions in the state.

At the most basic level, archives will organize the items they hold into collections. Each collection will have a title describing what is in it, such as "Postcards of the Wyoming Valley". Usually the description is accompanied by a date and creator of the items. In larger institutions, particularly government and university archives, collections further described by record groups (RG), categories, and type of item, such as photograph, loose papers, book, map, etc.

This process of organizing and describing archival items is called cataloging. There are three challenges with cataloging archival items: meeting standards, donation volume, and lack of indexing.

Government archives and university archives employ archivists trained in the standards of cataloging. Unfortunately, most of the state's local archives listed in Chapter 9, cannot afford to pay for professionally trained archivists to do cataloging. Catalogs, and even inventories of exactly what a local archive holds, are often lacking details or are nonexistent. 

There has been growing recognition of the value of local archive collections. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania's project Hidden Collections Initiative for Pennsylvania Small Archival Repositories sent professional archivists around to local archives in and around Philadelphia to learn what was at each one. Results of their cataloging can be found at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania's website at https://hsp.org/historical-heritage-organizations/hidden-collections-initiative-for-pennsylvania-small-archival-repositories/subject-guide and also on the Philadelphia Area Archives Research Portal (PAARP) at https://findingaids.library.upenn.edu.

In addition to the challenge of describing items so they can cataloged, there is also the issue of the volume of archival items to be processed. This might be shocking to read, but not everything in even highly-staffed archives is cataloged. Donated collections are always coming in, and it takes months to years to process each one. Every archival repository has piles of historical materials awaiting cataloging. To process materials, collections may have been quickly described with just a few words, such as "Correspondence, 1822–1864." Details such as who are in the letters or the subjects discussed are not in the catalog. 

One type of cataloging that is almost never done in archival records is indexing. Indexing is the process of going through every piece of an archival collection and noting the names, dates, and places on each item, then making all that information searchable in the catalog. For example, indexing is found in non-fiction books, so readers can search for topics of interest, then turn to the exact page with that topic. A book without an index means someone must read the entire book to find that topic. Another example of the value of indexing is records on genealogy websites. Digital images are tagged in the metadata with names, dates, and places, and that meta data is searchable in the website's computerized index. Genealogists can quickly add facts (the meta data) and images to their family trees through the power of indexing.

These challenges of cataloging historical items is why researchers often make revelatory discoveries in archival collections. One such discovery was made at the National Archives in Washington D.C. in 2021. A listing of families in Alaska for the 1890 census was cataloged by archives in the 1960s.

The listings were in a census enumerator's logbook, one of the few surviving records of the 1890 census. This logbook was stored for sixty years before a researcher found the precious information. Stories like this are a good reminder that any person who carefully goes through an archival collection has the possibility of discovering a piece of history thought to be lost forever.

If you are a researcher who would like to make big discoveries about the past, you need to learn how to navigate archive catalogs, and the catalogs' cousin: the finding aid.