Nt1330 Unit 3 Assignment

Words: 513
Pages: 3

I believe the main challenge I faced when doing this project was that, even though I was arranging my records, I found it difficult to give myself permission to make firm decisions about their arrangement. I had to drill it into my brain that there really is no entirely perfect way to arrange a fonds, and that I just had to make sure that I had reasonable justification for whichever decisions I made. This was really the most important lesson I learned from completing this assignment; that I am indeed capable of arranging and describing records, and that I need to be more confident in my own judgement. Inspired by our second assignment, I found it helpful to analyse other AtoM-inputted archival descriptions via Archeion to gain an understanding …show more content…
I aimed to make my fonds and its lower-level understandable and contextualized in ways that could accommodate such differences in access. So balancing RAD’s general assumption that people will indeed look at fonds as a whole (and look at them beginning with the top-level fonds description/access point) with the knowledge that this really isn’t the way that everyone accesses and searches for records in reality was a bit of a challenge. To overcome this, I continually asked myself “If someone comes in at the item/file/series level, would they still have a sufficient understanding of the content and context of that item/file/series?” I found this to be a helpful guiding question that helped me figure out how to provide enough detail so as to not confuse researchers or leave them without important contextual information, while also not burdening them with repetitive or irrelevant