Archival Arrangement and Description (With an Emphasis on Finding Aids)

Arrangement and description of records and the creation of finding aids are at the heart of all archival work. This article explains the five principles of archival arrangement, levels of arrangement and description, Principle of Provenance, original order, moderate degree of order, and organizational resources. Afterwards, it focuses on the importance of describing the content of archival resources using finding aids. Finding aids are introduced as a means of managerial supervision and archival description and are divided into three categories: internal supervision tools, intra-organizational referential indexes, and extra-organizational referential indexes. The last group is itself divided to calendars, checklists, indexes, and information network systems. Finally the standards for arranging and describing records are discussed.being identified, the content of the websites were downloaded using Webzip. In the next step, the features of the contents and structures of the downloaded national archives websites were extracted and analyzed. Using Microsoft Excel, the frequency of the extracted features were determined and included in a checklist. Similar items were omitted from the checklist and a preliminary attitude survey was conducted among archives experts. Based on findings, 41 important features of the content of the websites and 10 important features of their structure were identified. These features were included in a checklist and distributed among archives experts in order to determine the importance of each item. Among the features, 36 items relating to the content and 7 features relating to the structure of websites were considered more important and chosen for designing the proposed pattern.