What does the archives do with your stuff?
Imagine that you have some materials you would like to donate to the archives: photographs of city landmarks taken by your grandmother in the 1960s, for example.
To better understand what happens to your materials at the archives, we'll follow the materials from start to finish as they are made ready for other people to see them at the archives.
Section Overview
In this section, we'll talk about the different stages that your material goes through when you take it to the archives. You'll find out more about what each step involves and learn some of the words that archivists use to describe what they do.
If you're using the donor workbook, we'll encourage you to consider what kinds of information you can share with the archivist to help the archivist present your materials to the public.
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[ WORK IN PROGRESS ]
[ Short clips of archivists explaining what they do to archives (i.e. processing) ]
Acquisition
The first step in the process of donating your materials to the archives is acquisition. In the acquisition phase, the archivist will have a conversation with you about whether or not your materials are a good fit for the archives. Most archives have an acquisition policy that help archivists determine what they should acquire and what they might have to say 'no' to.
Most archives have limited space to store archival materials, so there may be times when they don't take materials that people donate - even though they appreciate the willingness of people to give important pieces of their history to the archives.
If the archives decides that your materials fall outside of their acquisition policy, it doesn't mean that your materials are unwanted. The archives might recommend another archival institution that would be a better home for your materials, like a municipal archives for your grandmother's photographs.
When an archives acquires your materials, you will typically sign a form or otherwise grant the archives permission to keep them. See "How do you prepare your stuff for the archives" to read more about what might be asked.
The archivist may also ask you questions about the materials in order to describe them appropriately to other users of the archives. Description (see "Description") is the most important dimension to enabling access to the materials - so the more information you can provide to the archivist at the time of acquisition, the better.
Selection
After the archives acquires someone's materials, the next step is selection. Although the archivist might decide to acquire the fonds - the group of materials as a whole - it's possible that not everything will be kept.
The archives will not dispose of any of your donated materials without consulting with you first, though the archivist might discuss with you during the acquisition phase what to do with materials not selected for permanent retention. You might ask the archivist to return any additional materials to you, or give the archivist permission to dispose of them.