Archival Description
The process of creating a structured, standardized representation of archival records — capturing their content, context, structure, and arrangement — so users can identify, understand, and locate the holdings.
Archival description is the work of recording standardized information about a body of records held by an archives, so that people can find and make sense of them. It captures what the records are about (content), who created them and why (context), how they are physically and logically arranged (structure), and the conditions of access and use. Description is typically multilevel, moving from the broad fonds or record group down through series, files, and sometimes individual items.
It matters because preservation alone does not make records usable; without description, even well-kept holdings are effectively invisible. Good description anchors records to their provenance and original order, preserving the evidential value that makes them trustworthy.
For example, an archivist describing an agency’s correspondence would document the creating office, date ranges, arrangement, and scope, then publish that as a finding aid. Standards such as ISAD(G), DACS, and the EAD encoding promote consistency. Archival description differs from item-level cataloging: it favors collective, hierarchical treatment rather than describing every document one by one.