ARCH 347/547: Ancient Artifacts in the Bryn Mawr Special Collections: Using Archives

Monday to Thursday

10am-12pm and 1pm-4pm

Email SpecColl@brynmawr.edu to make an appointment and request material.

Archives have two main spaces, a public reading room, where researchers work with material, and private stacks, which are only accessible to staff. Researchers should generally request the material they want to work with ahead of time and make a research appointment. Doing this at least 24 hours ahead of time will allow the archive you're visiting to have the boxes you want to work with waiting for you when you arrive. When you arrive at the archive, someone will help you check in and get set up with your requested material.

Although each institution will have its own set of rules for the reading room, there are some general guidelines they all share, which are applicable at Bryn Mawr College too:

• When you arrive, you will be asked to check in. Most archives keep records of who their visitors are. If you're affiliated with the TriCo, you'll be asked to sign in to a physical book with your name and TriCo email address. We ask outside researchers to provide a form of ID and fill out a brief registration form, a process you may experience while visiting another archival institution.
• Food, drinks, pens, highlighters or markers are not allowed in the reading room to prevent damage to materials. At Bryn Mawr, we can provide pencils for you if you do not have any and want to take physical notes. Laptops, tablets, and phones are allowed, and we have charging outlets under every table in the reading room.
• Bags, coats, and umbrellas are not allowed at your table. We provide cubby spaces and a coat rack for you to store your things when you arrive in the reading room. Some archives may provide a locker outside of the reading room and expect you to store your belongings there even before you enter the reading room.
• When using books and other bound material, you must use a book support. Reading room staff will provide you with these V-shaped supports. All bound volumes must stay in the support while in use. These supports take pressure off the spine of books and help to extend their life. Although you may be working with material that is relatively new or otherwise in good shape, we still require the use of supports to help keep the books that way. For material with tight binding—which may make the book want to close when left alone in the support—we can provide book weights to help hold pages open while you work.
• Reading rooms are quiet spaces. Although most libraries have moved away from the stereotype of a librarian shushing patrons, the small size of reading rooms means that archives staff ask for any conversations to be kept at a low volume and ask that any phone calls be taken outside of the reading room.
• Reading rooms are not general study spaces. Because the reading room is the only place researchers can use archival materials, we're unable to provide study space for other purposes, but there are spaces on the second floor outside of the reading room with couches and tables available for general use.

Outside of specific rules, there are also some general best practices to keep in mind while conducting archival research:

• Give yourself time to do your research. Archival research is a discovery process and takes longer than research using secondary sources. You may get lucky and find material that interests you or that aligns with your research topic right away, but you may also need to spend some time going through material. Don't leave archival research to the last minute and plan to spend at least an hour in the reading room at a time.
• Keep detailed notes on which box and folder you find material in. You don't want to look at your notes a week later and discover that you have notes on a document you'd like to use in your research but no idea where it's from. Write down the collection name, the box number, and the folder title and/or number for any document you think might be useful in the future. For example:
  • Katharine Elizabeth McBride Papers, Box 33, Folder: Self Government Association
• When allowed, take photographs of material you're interested in. At Bryn Mawr, we allow photographs of the vast majority of our materials as long as flash is turned off. Other institutions may have more restrictive photography policies, so be sure to check with archives staff before taking photographs.
• When in doubt, ask for help. If you have any questions about the material you're working with, finding other material relevant to your research, reading room policies, or anything else, please feel free to ask us. We're here to make your life easier!

Unlike books in the library stacks, which are usually organized by subject, archivists organize material by creator. While books are catalogued at an individual level, the amount of material in archives means that archivists can't catalogue each individual item. Instead, archivists describe collections as a whole using finding aids as guides to a given collection.

What is a finding aid? 

A finding aid is a discovery and description tool which typically consists of structural and contextual information about an archival resource. They may also place collections into context, providing other information about the collection, such as acquisition and processing; provenance, including administrative history or biographical note; scope of the collection, including size, subjects, media; organization and arrangement; dates of material within the collection; and an inventory of the series and the folders. They also include a list of series, boxes, folders, and sometimes individual items.

How do researchers use finding aids?

Researchers search or browse finding aids to find materials relevant to their research. They can be used to narrow down a request to specific boxes or folders that researchers wish to see during their visit to the archive. If items are digitized, finding aids will often include links to those digitized items.