General Information about Finding Aids

While searching for information, researchers may come across a “finding aid” for the first time and are not sure how to use this document.

Finding aids are guides written by archivists to describe collections of archival materials. They are usually constructed in two main parts: the front matter and the container list. The "front matter" is a list that describes the content and the context of the whole collection, such as the title of the collection, a brief abstract, inclusive dates, biographical and historical notes, and so on. A container list indicates the range of materials found in each box (or other container) in the collection. Together these two elements of a finding aid provide standard fields of information to document the contextual evidence of the material’s creation, acquisition, and arrangement, along with box and folder lists to help aid in the retrieval of the collection's contents.

Finding aids detailing Columbia's archival collections can be found through searching CLIO, the Columbia University online catalog. Much of the “front matter” is seen in the collection-level CLIO record, but the finding aids themselves contain much more detail, helping researchers to locate that proverbial “needle in the haystack.”

Collection-Level Records in CLIO

The following catalog fields (also known as "access points") are found in the archival collection-level record in CLIO:

• Creator: The creator or compiler of the collection. Often contains material authored by others and sent or collected by the creator.
• Title: Full title of the collection, records, papers, etc.
• Date: Span of dates for the entire collection. “Bulk” dates indicate the majority of the materials.
• Physical Description: The size of the collection, usually measured in feet and the number of containers.
• Arrangement: The intellectual and/or physical organization of the materials, often broken into subunits called “series” and “subseries.” These units usually reflect record-creating activities, groups, or genres.
• Biographical/Historical Note: Background of the creator.
• Scope and Content Note: Summary of the materials, such as collection highlights; obvious gaps in records; significant or heavily-represented topics, people, organizations, or geographic places; media formats, if any; and so on.
• Access: Information regarding legal or policy restrictions on the use of the materials.
• Provenance/Acquisition: Information regarding how and from whom the library acquired the item(s).

Here is an example of a collection-level record -- the Leonard C. Harber papers – as found in CLIO:

While CLIO offers a snapshot description of the collection, that description may lack details for specific items found within the collection itself. For more detailed information about the contents of the collection, choose the link “Finding Aid” in the holdings box.

Using Health Sciences Library Finding Aids

Selecting the link to the finding aid will direct the researcher to the Health Sciences Library’s Archives & Special Collections division. From this webpage, there is a link to the full finding aid, available as a PDF. This document will contain more fields than what has been entered into CLIO, along with the container list for the collection.

The finding aid will likely have more in-depth histories and descriptions of the activities documented in the collection, along with media formats found in the “series” and “subseries” components. There may be notes regarding the processing and custodial history of the collection, any additional formats available (e.g., digitized content), materials that may have been separated from the main collection and their location, and other related collections. This information provides context for how the materials were created, acquired by the library, and processed by the archivist — all which help the researcher determine if the collection contains relevant information for their research.

When trying to locate items in a collection, researchers should refer to the container list. It is important to know that container lists usually describe materials at the box or folder-level, not the item-level, so it not a complete listing of the collection's contents. The level of arrangement for a collection should be noted in the “Arrangement” field, as well as in the series and other component descriptions.

Once the researcher knows which containers they might wish to consult, they can begin their research. The boxes and folders refer to physical containers that must be requested in person or remotely by staff. Born-digital materials are only accessible onsite in the Archives & Special Collections reading room.

For example, if you are searching material relating to the Japanese Cosmetic Society, you could search the text of the PDF to find a reference to that society here:

That said, you hadn't searched for that term directly in the Harber finding aid PDF, you probably would not have found this material by searching either the library website or Google. For archival materials, the most successful searches are those done within the discovery systems for libraries and archives, such as (in Columbia's case) CLIO. Thankfully, this situation is changing, as detailed below.

Interactive Finding Aids

The previous example was of a finding aid presented as static PDF document, but many finding aids have more sophisticated searching and navigation features, such as those found on the Empire State Archival Discovery Cooperative (EmpireADC) site or in the Columbia University Libraries Archives Portal. Archives may also link digital objects within their finding aids, as is done for the Columbia-held collection of the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

HSL's Archives & Special Collections contributes its finding aids to EmpireADC, which allows searches within finding aids from across multiple repositories throughout New York.

The encoding of these finding aids in EmpireADC allows searching down to the container list, as opposed to CLIO searches, which are only at the collection level. These finding aids have the same structure as those described in the introduction to this piece, but they vary in how the user navigates within them.

For example, using the simple search phrase Japanese Cosmetic Society in EmpireADC retrieves several results from various member institutions. A folder-level item from the Harber papers is the first result, showing how this discovery system searches all levels of the finding aid.

By selecting that first result, the file information is shown in relation to the intellectual arrangement of the Harber papers:

Although not true in this example, a digital object could be linked to this finding aid description, allowing researchers to search and retrieve digital material while retaining and navigating the intellectual context within a collection.

According to this finding aid, material described as "Japanese Cosmetic Society, Talk #1 slides, circa 1984", is located in Box-folder 3.6 in series: Photographs, collection: Leonard C. Harber papers, and repository: Columbia University Medical Center. Because there are no digital objects available online, the researcher would need to request access to this material by contacting the Archives & Special Collections staff.

EmpireADC allows more precise searching of archival collections than is currently available through CLIO or the Archives & Special Collections website. The finding aids on the EmpireADC site have been cataloged using the interoperable EAD XML data format, allowing them to be shared with other discovery systems to reach a broader audience.

The technology behind archival discovery continues to evolve. Researchers may expect different experiences with different systems. That is true here at HSL as well. Stay tuned for new developments in Archives & Special Collections!