SAA Arrangement and Description: Fundamentals Workshop
October 2020
Thanks to the generosity of the CLRC’s Professional Development Grant, I was able to virtually attend a workshop entitled ‘Arrangement & Description: Fundamentals’ offered by the Society of American Archivists (SAA) on October 26 and 29, 2020.
Part of my duties at SUNY Upstate Medical University Health Sciences Library would be archival processing. While looking for educational opportunities to develop my skills as an archivist, I got to know about this workshop and a CLRC’s grant opportunity thanks to my supervisor. Through this workshop, I learned the principles of arrangement and descriptive standards that would equip me with the knowledge to process our collections that record the history of Medicine in Central New York.
On the first day of the workshop, I was able to learn the importance of arrangement that I had vaguely known. Learning the procedures of the physical arrangement was beneficial as I was able to apply them to make an inventory of several boxes from our collections after the workshop.
The second day focused on descriptive standards and the essential elements of a finding aid. My takeaway from this workshop was that users should always be a priority for archival descriptions, and archival descriptions should be prone to use and share. In the afternoon, I had a chance to work with participants to create a finding aid. It was impressive that one collection was being described in multiple versions of finding aids through insights of archivists.
It was a valuable experience in that this workshop equipped me with a better understanding of arrangement and descriptive standards not only to publish finding aids for our collections but also provide access to support research and teaching. Keeping in mind that the underlying goal of arrangement and description is in providing access to the archival collections, I hope to apply the theory to practice enabling our archival holdings to be effectively retrieved.
Chaeyeon Kim
Assistant Librarian & Diversity Fellow, Upstate Medical University
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