Archival Research

The most important thing when working with rare and old materials is to move slowly and never try to force an item to do something it doesn't want to do. Speed is never more important than caution!
Other key handling points include:

• Please wash your hands before entering the reading room.
• Remove sharp or dangling bracelets, rings and watches
• Use foldered material flat on the tables and turn the pages like a book
• Open books on foam book cradles, which will be provided by a staff member
• Touch rare and old material as little as possible to reduce damage from oils on your hands
  • We do not use gloves when working with paper based material because they reduce finger sensitivity and increase clumsiness. 
  • Gloves are only necessary when working with negatives and photographic prints that are not in plastic sleeves because fingerprints can cause permanent damage on those media. 

1. Archives are materials created or received by a person, family, or organization that are preserved because of the enduring value of the information they contain.
2. Manuscripts include handwritten documents, unpublished documents, and drafts of a book, article, or other works submitted for publication.
3. Rare Books are those known to exist in only a few copies.  They may have significant monetary value if collectors and libraries prize them for a number of factors, including scarcity (only a few exist), autographs or annotations written in the author's hand, a special printing or binding process, subject, distinctive illustrations, format, or a unique provenance (origination and ownership).
4. Folio: a single leaf in a book or a manuscript.
5. Collections are groups of materials assembled by a person, family, organization, or repository. They may be divided hierarchically into series, groupings, and files.
6. Containers are anything that houses or stores archival materials. A container might be a standard size archival box, an oversize box, a broadside folder, or a media case. Boxes are typically in sizes standard to the profession.
7. Digital records are born-digital and digitized materials that are available online.
8. Repositories are institutions that hold archival materials. 
9. Name records are the people, families, and organizations that create archival materials.
10. Subject records are topics, places, and genres used to describe the context and content of archival materials.

(Definitions adapted from the Yale Archives and Buffalo & Eric County Public Library).

While conducting your research in the Reading Room, it is important to keep track of where your materials come from in order to cite them properly. We recommend to capture the following information in a written/typed note or photograph:

• Collection title
• Call number
• Box and folder numbers,
• Item title
• Date
• Description

You can then reference the finding aid to create a citation by pressing the “Citation” button in the top right corner for an automate citation

If you are citing a digitized item from the Amherst College Digital Collections webpage, you can scroll down to the Metadata section for general information about the collection title and date. reference the “Shelf Location” field for box and folder numbers. This record also links out to the item’s corresponding catalog record and finding aide.
For more detailed guidelines differing by citation style, reference the Purdue Guide to Citing Archival Sources. You can find the box and folder number for an item by selecting an item in the right-hand ‘collection organization’ section, then referring to the location information under the title.