Cataloguing

Once you have taken in an archive collection, the next step is to organise and describe it in a way that makes it easy for you to manage and make available for researchers. This process is known as arrangement.

Arrangement ensures you know and record:

• What the collection contains
• How much material there is
• How the items in the collection relate to each other
• Where the items are stored
• If there are any conditions relating to access

If archive collections are not arranged there is a risk of losing information:

• Physically eg losing or misplacing one of a collection of notebooks
• Intellectually eg not having any information about a folder of photographs

A loss of information means a risk of:

• Being unable to help a researcher with their enquiries
• The collection losing its research value