Setting up an in-house Archive
Cataloguing
National Telephone Company phone directory for Yorkshire. Image courtesy of BT Heritage.
The process of cataloguing provides a detailed record of your archive collections. For companies that want to make their archives publicly accessible, for example with on-line catalogues, it is recommended to follow international professional standards for cataloguing. For more information visit http://www.icacds.org.uk/eng/standards.htm
For businesses with less resource – in terms of time and finance - this level of cataloguing is impractical because it is costly and time-consuming to deliver. Just how much detail you go into depends on the size and complexity of the collection and how quickly you want to realise its potential, but all catalogues should contain the following information:
Admin details – box number, item number
or unique reference, location in
archive store.
Context or provenance details – who created the records i.e. company name and/or division and/or department and/or section and/or project and/or person; depending on the complexity of your organisation and how much you know about the record.
Content detail - what information is in the records, what does the record tell us, and when was it created i.e. date or date range. The level of detail here can be high level or fairly in-depth depending how interesting it is in terms of what it describes and how you will re-use the information. For example you may want to list at item level all of your company’s press releases including their titles so that a computer search for any publicly-communicated event is easily found. On the other hand a decade’s worth of risk registers can be described as “risk registers” with covering dates e.g. 1995-2005.
Accessibility of information – computer-catalogues
Archives should be catalogued on computer allowing easy access
to information, using industry-standard software such as CAIRS,
DBTextworks, CALM or equivalent. See The Archives and Records
Association's on-line directory of suppliers for more
information at
http://www.archives.org.uk/publications/arcdirectoryofsuppliers2010.html.
Up-to-date summary catalogues should be sent to the National
Register of Archives (NRA), which maintains a register on behalf of
The National Archives describing the nature and whereabouts of
records relating to British history. Alternatively, if catalogues
are mounted on a business’s or institution’s website
the relevant url should be reported to the NRA.