In archival science, “arranging” does not mean tidying up. Arrangement is the intellectual and physical operation that puts the documents of a fonds in order, applying respect des fonds or, failing that, explicit criteria. It leads to forming the articles, assigning their reference codes and shelving them, and it shapes the finding aid that will make it possible to find them again. To talk about arrangement is in fact to talk about the whole processing of a fonds.

Its central tool is the arrangement scheme: the structure, thought through before it is applied, that divides the fonds into large groupings and then into files.

The levels of a fonds

ISAD(G) describes a fonds as a hierarchy of levels. Professional usage separates them into two families.

Grouping levels (“high levels”) organize the fonds:

  • the sub-fonds, an organic division that often corresponds to the archives of a creator linked to the main creator;
  • the series, a set of files kept together because they result from the same activity, relate to the same function or subject, or share the same form. Series form the backbone of the scheme;
  • the sub-series, a subdivision of a series, useful mainly in large series.

Fine levels of description (“low levels”) carry the documents themselves:

  • the file, a set of documents brought together by the creator or during arrangement because they concern the same matter. It is usually the basic unit of description;
  • the item, the smallest indivisible unit, physically and intellectually: a contract, a poster, a recording, a firing log.

Not every fonds uses every level. A small fonds can make do with series and files; a rich fonds will go down to item level for its most precious documents only.

The steps of processing

Full processing unfolds in three phases, and the order matters: each step assumes the previous one.

Understand before you touch. Start with a survey, without moving anything: how many linear meters or gigabytes, which media, in what condition, stored how, through whose hands. This survey already feeds the description of the creator and the archival history. Next, pick out the main activities the documents bear witness to: they will give the series. The resulting scheme is written down, then tested on a few boxes picked at random. A scheme that cannot survive twenty files will not survive two thousand.

Put in order. Once the scheme is approved, form the files, put each one back in its place in its series, replace damaged or acidic containers, then assign the reference codes and label (see Numbering your archives). This is the longest phase, and the one where a mistake in the scheme costs the most: hence the value of being able to move a whole branch without starting over.

Make accessible. Finally, write the records, from the fonds down to the files, index what needs indexing, and assemble the finding aid with its introduction. The boxes go to the stacks, and you note where each one is.

Building the scheme of a studio fonds

There is no standard scheme. The safest course is to start from what the creator did, and to ask, for each activity, whether it left enough documents to form a series. Take a fictional fonds, that of Hélène Varin, a ceramicist. Her activity breaks down as follows:

HVA   Hélène Varin fonds
├── 1  Life and career           training, awards, residencies, teaching
├── 2  Creation                  one file per piece or series of pieces
├── 3  Studios and firings       glaze notebooks, kiln logs, suppliers
├── 4  Public commissions        one file per commission, from competition to acceptance
├── 5  Dissemination             exhibitions, galleries, fairs, press
└── 6  Administration            accounts, insurance, rights

Series 3 and 4 would have no place in a painter’s fonds; here they are essential. That is the whole point of starting from activities rather than from a ready-made list.

A few rules help you choose:

  • start from activities, not subjects: an “Exhibitions” series groups what the exhibition produced, not everything about a city where it took place;
  • keep the top of the scheme short: five to ten series are usually enough, the detail comes at lower levels;
  • choose a simple internal order within each series: chronological for projects and exhibitions, alphabetical by correspondent for letters;
  • plan for accruals: a living fonds will keep growing, and the scheme must be able to take in new files without renumbering everything.

Léa Martin’s example

The Memory Atlas guide follows the fonds of Léa Martin, a photographer. Her scheme fits into five series:

Photographic fonds
├── 1  Personal projects
│   ├── A  Project A — Lisières
│   │   ├── REC  Research
│   │   ├── NEG  Negatives
│   │   ├── SCN  Scans
│   │   └── TIR  Prints
│   └── B  Project B — Rivages
├── 2  Commissions (creator: Studio X)
├── 3  Exhibitions
├── 4  Publications
└── 5  Correspondence

The rules above can be read in it: series based on activity (creating, answering commissions, exhibiting, publishing, corresponding), one sub-series per project, and within each project files that follow the photographer’s working order, from research to prints. A new project will find its place as “C” without moving anything.

In Memory Atlas

The Memory Atlas tree is the arrangement scheme: each node has a level (C, F, SF, S, SS, D, P), and the application refuses inconsistent placements, such as an item with children or a series placed above a fonds. A few features directly support the steps of processing:

  • building and reworking the scheme: create child and sibling units from the keyboard, drag and drop a branch, move it up or down among its siblings, with confirmation when a move changes reference codes (Build the tree);
  • bringing in an existing inventory: a CSV spreadsheet is converted into a tree, useful when an initial stocktaking has already been done elsewhere;
  • tracking progress: each unit has a status, from “Draft” to “Validated”, and a collapsed branch shows the number of validated descendants;
  • documenting the arrangement: element 3.3.4, System of arrangement, describes at fonds level the scheme adopted and the internal order of the series.

Once the scheme is settled, each article receives a reference code that says where it is. That is the subject of the next article: Numbering your archives.

Further reading

  • International Council on Archives, ISAD(G), 2nd edition, 2000: appendix A-1, model of the levels of arrangement of a fonds.
  • Christine Nougaret and Bruno Galland, Les instruments de recherche dans les archives, La Documentation française, 1999.
  • Association des archivistes français, Abrégé d’archivistique, 4th edition, 2020.
  • Arrangement
  • Method
  • Memory Atlas