Archives and Manuscripts Post Two

This morning, I read Chapter Four of Understanding Archives and Manuscripts and Theodore Schellenberg’s “Principles of Arrangement.” After completing the reading, I stopped by Temple’s Special Collections Research Center in hopes of finding some pictures for an exhibit at the Temple Medical School library that I’ve been helping create. While I didn’t find too much suitable material for the exhibit, the readings helped me to see the archival material that I examined in a new light, giving me a greater perspective on how such material is arranged.

In their respective works, Schellenberg, O’Toole, and Cox all discuss arranging material within recent accessions in relation to their greater whole, showing the context of a past project or event. This remains important in its providing of a historical trajectory and its accessibility to researchers. Such organization ensures that a scholar doesn’t have to rummage through numerous boxes of a collection for a specific aspect of an organization, but can rather find answers in one specific folder.

Today, I looked through the Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania records and observed a similar type of organization. Particularly, I looked through the box consisting of documentation of the group’s various outreach projects. While other boxes remained devoted to other organizational aspects, Boxes 4 and 5 focused on projects, revealing the archivist’s arrangement tactics of organizing the material in a manner conducive to scholarly research. Furthermore, inside the actual box, various folders held the records of various Planned Parenthood projects that had occurred over the course of multiple decades. These folders showcased the archival method of arranging materials in relation to one another as a part of a greater scholarly whole. For example, the folder entitled “Family Life Program,” provided information on the organization’s North Philly 1980s outreach program, but also numerous 1980s articles on the neighborhood’s post-industrial state, providing the scholar further context into the neighborhood where the project took place.

It is unclear as to whether Planned Parenthood organized these documents like this themselves, or whether the archivist had exercised “intellectual arrangement” and organized the material in a manner best suited to scholarship. Yet, either way, the material presented itself in a manner reflective of the principles of archival arrangement.