MVCC Library Archives Finding Aid: Definition of Archival terms

Definitions taken from Arranging & Describing: Archives & Manuscripts by Kathleen D. Roe.

Accession: to take legal and physical custody of a group of records or other materials and to formally document their receipt.

Arrangement: the process of organizing materials with respect to their provenance and original order, to protect their context and to achieve physical and intellectual control over the materials.

Context: the organizational, functional, and operational circumstances surrounding materials' creation, receipt, storage, or use and its relationship to other materials.

Description: the creation of an accurate representation of a unit of archival material by the process of capturing, collating, analyzing, and organizing information that serves to identify archival material and explain the context and records system(s) that produced it.

Original Order: the principle that the order of the records that was established by the creator should be retained whenever possible to preserve existing relationships between the documents and the evidential value inherent in their order.

Provenance: the relationships between records and the organizations or individuals that created, assembled, accumulated, and/or maintained and used them in the conduct of personal or corporate activity.

Record group: a body of organizationally related records established on the basis of provenance by an archives for control purposes. A record group constitutes the archives (or the part thereof in the custody of an archival institution) of an autonomous recordkeeping corporate body.

Series: documents arranged in accordance with a filing system or maintained as a unit because they result from the same accumulation or filing process, the same function, or the same activity; have a particular form or subject; or because of some other relationship arising out of their creation, receipt, or use.