Learn to Love the Humble Finding Aid

An archive is a storehouse of knowledge. The usefulness of any archive is measured in the ability of one to be able to access that knowledge quickly and accurately. This is accomplished via a tool called a "Finding Aid."

The finding aid allows you, the patron, to locate any item or series of items you would like from a specific collection. It also translates topics, subjects, names and dates into the language of archivists, namely the file, box and shelf location of the materials.

A finding aid will also provide the context of the collection. Usually this will consist of a brief biographical or historical note about the source of the collection and the provenance of the acquisition. The finding aid will also announce any restrictions on access or duplication that may be placed on items in the collection you are using.

Most archives are moving their finding aids to their home pages. This is a great benefit for the researcher as it allows them to plan their trip to the facility in advance and in many cases request materials before their arrival. This allows researchers to spend less time waiting for items to be pulled from the stacks and more time actually using the materials to perform meaningful research.

Let's take a look at an example to help show how Finding Aids make the researcher's life easier:

We'll take a look at the B&O Railroad Museum's Hays T. Watkins Library and Archives Finding Aid for the CSX Collection.



You'll see that the first part of this document describes the collection, provides notice that access may be restricted and gives instructions for accessing the collection. It also states that the finding aid itself is a searchable PDF file and gives instructions for how to locate items in the document.



The next image here shows how the collection is physically arranged. You can see that there are box numbers and individual locations for the items in that series. If you wanted say, the Annual Reports of the Buffalo Rochester and Pittsburgh Railway from 1882-1900, you would need to ask for Box 402-H-1, Location 16.2.8. This gives the archivist the physical location of these items and allows them to quickly locate them on the shelf and retrieve them for you.

Without the finding aid, this would be a much more difficult task. The archivist would be required to know the exact location of all items in this collection. If you were to look at the finding aid, you'd see it is a very large collection and such a feat would be impractical.

So next time you're planning to do some research at an archive, help make it as productive as possible by using the finding aid.