Characteristics of Archival Materials

Those listed below are most frequently encountered during the examination of a collection.  These characteristics in turn directly influence descriptive practices.

Below are the characteristics Of archival materials;

-Items generated in context of an activity 
-Documents are created or compiled as a result of some activity or function; as such, they are the evidence of the activities of individuals or corporate bodies. 

For example,
-individuals often keep receipts to document expenses over the course of a year for income tax purposes.  
-Department stores maintain inventory records to document what has been bought and sold. 
-In both cases, the documents preserved reflect activity.


Groups of items related to one another
Archival materials exist as groups of related items.  Unlike museum curators and librarians, archivists view their collections not as individual items but rather as groups of documents.   

While an individual item may be significant in and of itself, it is generally grouped together with other documents created by the same activity. 

Consider, for instance, documents generated in the course of buying a house. These may include a title to the property, loan papers,  correspondence, inspection papers, and survey documents.

Instead of focusing on each individual document, the archivist views such a group of documents as a record of the sales transaction.

Documents that are arranged in accordance with a filing system or maintained as a unit because they result from the same activity or accumulation or filing process, or because they have a particular form, or some other relationship arising out of their creation, receipt, or use are called series.  

Varied content: collection contain information about topics, events, activities, or people
Because  materials in archival collections are evidence of the entire range of personal and institutional activities and functions, the information contained in them is diverse. 

For example, among the personal papers of an individual there may be groups of documents created as the result of religious, professional, and a vocational activities. 

These papers may contain information about a particular church and its members, the accomplishments of committees on which the individual served, professional projects undertaken here and abroad, and papers and artifacts related to hobbies from bungee jumping to stamp collecting. 

Content analysis is conducted to extract this varied information so that it can be brought to the attention of the user.  The more varied the information in the collection, the more extensive the analysis.

Varied formats: collection may be of many formats and types  
A collection might consist primarily of  material of one type, such as letters, or it may contain a mixture of material types such as computer files, photographs, maps, and textual records. 

For Instance, A collection of documents relating to a wedding, for instance, may contain a marriage license, catering bills, invitations, registration books, photographs, and a video recording of the marriage ceremony and reception.

Different formats and types of materials may require different descriptive practices and therefore use different descriptive standards.

Consist of large numbers of items
Archival collections often consist of hundreds and even thousands of individual items. The larger the collection, and the more varied its content and  material types, the greater the potential for complex internal relationships.

It is neither efficient nor necessary to describe each individual item in a collection. 

Instead, summary descriptions are written to represent and convey the primary content of the collection to the user.

Most collections lack any formal means of identification
Unlike books and other published materials, items in archival collections usually lack title pages or imprint information to identify that particular collection or group of documents. 

Archivists provide identifying information for collections. Because there is no formal identification, archivists extract, compile, and extrapolate information from the collection rather than transcribe information from a standardized source, such as a title page.