Lunch & Learn: Archives and Manuscripts: Library Finding Aids with Daniel Santamaria

The Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions at the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library holds world class archival and man­u­scripts col­lec­tions. The Mudd Man­u­script Library, with more than 35,000 lin­ear feet of stor­age, holds two major col­lec­tions: The Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Archives and “Pub­lic Pol­icy Papers” which include very sig­nif­i­cant col­lec­tions in the areas of for­eign pol­icy, eco­nom­ics and eco­nomic devel­op­ment, Civil Lib­er­ties, Law and Jurispru­dence.
Find­ing aids, descrip­tive inven­to­ries cre­ated by archival repos­i­to­ries in order to pro­vide access to col­lec­tions, serve as the entry points for schol­ars and researchers to dis­cover and explore these col­lec­tions. In order to pro­vide a stan­dard struc­ture for find­ing aids, the archival com­mu­nity devel­oped an inter­na­tional XML meta­data stan­dard, Encoded Archival Descrip­tion (EAD) in 1995.
Com­pa­ra­ble to AACR2 and MARC for bib­li­o­graphic records, the con­tent stan­dard for Find­ing Aids has now been adopted by numer­ous insti­tu­tions. EAD reflects the hier­ar­chi­cal nature of archival col­lec­tions and pro­vides a struc­ture for describ­ing the whole of a col­lec­tion, as well as its com­po­nents. And the stan­dard sup­ports flex­i­ble search­ing by col­lec­tion, cre­ator, biogra­phies, title, call num­ber, or topic.

With more than 5,000 patrons a year, the man­u­script library has sought to reduce its back­log in recog­ni­tion that it is unrea­son­able and even uneth­i­cal to “pre­serve” mate­r­ial with­out mak­ing it avail­able to researchers. For archivists, pro­vid­ing access requires pro­cess­ing, phys­i­cally orga­niz­ing the mate­ri­als usu­ally con­tained in boxes and fold­ers, and describ­ing the con­tents in find­ing aids. At the April 22 Lunch ‘n Learn sem­i­nar, Daniel San­ta­maria intro­duced the Library’s EAD web­site.
A quick search brought up the Find­ing Aid for the papers of George Ken­nan ’25, a noted diplo­mat and his­to­rian. The exten­sive find­ing aid con­tains an infor­ma­tive biog­ra­phy as well as a detailed descrip­tion of the orga­ni­za­tion of the papers. Like the other find­ing aids, it places the Ken­nan papers within the con­text of the era in which the doc­u­ments were cre­ated.
San­ta­maria empha­sized that it can be very chal­leng­ing to main­tain and gain con­trol over these col­lec­tions and effi­ciently and to describe their con­tents suc­cinctly. Col­lec­tions can be as small as a sin­gle box or thou­sands of boxes (the largest col­lec­tion at Mudd, the records of ACLU, con­tains sev­eral thou­sand boxes. More than 2,000 find­ing aids rep­re­sent­ing all Uni­ver­sity Archives, Pub­lic Pol­icy Papers and nearly all Man­u­scripts Divi­sion col­lec­tions are now avail­able at Mudd to assist patrons. Latin Amer­i­can Ephemera and Engi­neer­ing Library find­ing aids are also avail­able. Mov­ing for­ward, the library hopes to develop a more dynamic inter­face to the find­ing aids and to increase the use of find­ing
aids to pro­vide access to dig­i­tal con­tent.
Daniel San­ta­maria is Assis­tant Uni­ver­sity Archivist for Tech­ni­cal Ser­vices at the See­ley G. Mudd Man­u­script Library at Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity. In his cur­rent posi­tion he over­sees acces­sion­ing, pro­cess­ing, and descrip­tive prac­tices. He has over­seen the pro­cess­ing of sev­eral thou­sand lin­ear feet of orga­ni­za­tional records and per­sonal papers since 2005. Dan has pre­vi­ously worked at the New York Pub­lic Library and both the Spe­cial Col­lec­tions Library and the Bent­ley His­tor­i­cal Library at the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan. He holds an MSI from the Uni­ver­sity of Michigan’s School of Infor­ma­tion and a BA in His­tory from Wes­leyan Uni­ver­sity. He is active in the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Con­fer­ence and Soci­ety of Amer­i­can Archivists, and has pre­sented and taught work­shops at numer­ous meet­ings and con­fer­ences.
A pod­cast and the pre­sen­ta­tion are available.