Primary Sources Research Guide

Archives are "materials created or received by a person, family, or organization, in the conduct of their affairs and preserved because of their enduring value. Archives can also refer to the division within an organization responsible for maintaining the organization's records of enduring value, or a building or institution that houses such records." - Society of American Archivists

Finding Aids help you find materials in archives. A finding aid is like a table of contents to an entire archival collection, providing information on the history of the materials and their current organization. For instance, the finding aid to the Emily Dickinson Collection at Amherst College describes how the manuscripts moved from Dickinson's home to our Archives, as well as how they are currently organized in boxes and folders for easy access. Finding aids point to collections, not the contents of the collections themselves. A finding aid may only tell you that a certain person or topic is included in an archival collection, not detailed information describing individual letters or documents and their specific contents.

Find primary sources in Amherst College collections:

• Collections and Finding Aids for the Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College 
• Amherst College Digital Collections - digitized materials from College collections

Find primary sources in Five College collections:

• Hampshire College Archives and Special Collections
• Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections
• Smith College Special Collections
• UMass Amherst Special Collections and University Archives

Find archival materials beyond the Five Colleges:

• World Cat - limit your results (by format) to Archival material. 
• SNAC (Social Networks and Archival Context) - Biographical and historical information about persons, families, and organizations that created or are documented in historical resources (primary source documents) and their connections to one another. 

A handy way to determine where you can find archival materials related to a particular person or topic is to check the sources listed in a biography or other secondary work on your topic. Often the acknowledgements section of a secondary resource will highlight the most significant archival collections used by the author.

Finding Aids help you find materials in archives. A finding aid is like a table of contents to an entire archival collection, providing information on the history of the materials and their current organization. For instance, the finding aid to the Emily Dickinson Collection at Amherst College describes how the manuscripts moved from Dickinson's home to our Archives, as well as how they are currently organized in boxes and folders for easy access. Finding aids point to collections, not the contents of the collections themselves. A finding aid may only tell you that a certain person or topic is included in an archival collection, not detailed information describing individual letters or documents and their specific contents.

How an archival institution is built is based on the institution’s collection development policy. From the Society of American Archivists’ Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology: “The function within an archives or other repository that establishes policies and procedures used to select materials that the repository will acquire, typically identifying the scope of creators, subjects, formats, and other characteristics that influence the selection process.” From (Sauer 2001, p. 308): “Written collection development policies are advocated as a way to ensure that collections have coherent and well-defined focus, while cooperative collecting practices are seen as a way to ensure that related materials are not scattered among far-flung repositories and that repositories' scarce resources are not needlessly squandered on unnecessary competitiveness for collections.”

These two principles guide the way archivists write finding aids for the public:

Provenance is a fundamental principle of archives, referring to the individual, family, or organization that created or received the items in a collection. The principle of provenance or the respect des fonds dictates that records of different origins (provenance) be kept separate to preserve their context.

Original order is a fundamental principle of archives. Maintaining records in original order serves two purposes. First, it preserves existing relationships and evidential significance that can be inferred from the context of the records. Second, it exploits the record creator's mechanisms to access the records, saving the archives the work of creating new access tools.

Original order is not the same as the order in which materials were received. Items that were clearly misfiled may be refiled in their proper location. Materials may have had their original order disturbed, often during inactive use, before transfer to the archives; see restoration of original order.

A collection may not have meaningful order if the creator stored items in a haphazard fashion. In such instances, archivists often impose order on the materials to facilitate arrangement and description. The principle of respect for original order does not extend to respect for original chaos.

The finding aid is a result of arranging and describing archival materials in a way that respects the principles of provenance and original order. It’s helpful to think of a finding aid as both a catalog record and the table of contents of a book. It’s like a catalog record because the first part of the finding aid (biographical information, call number, scope and organization of the collection) tells you the aboutness of the material you’re about to look at. The second part of the finding aid (an inventory) tells you what exactly is in the collection and where it is. Reading the first part of a finding aid will give you all the context you need to understand that inventory.