Water Department Map of the Cedar and Tolt River Watersheds with the City of Seattle. Courtesy Seattle Municipal Archives.

Learning Objective number 1:

Learn and apply the methods of arrangement and description used in the Seattle Municipal Archives for most record types.

Arrangement and Description (also called "processing) is the most basic thing an archivist does. It consists of putting the materials of a collection in a certain order and then making a list of the materials in the collection. The amount of time needed to arrange and describe a collection varies depending upon how many items are in the collection and how detailed the archivist wants to be.

To fulfill my learning objective, I was given a collection of documents generated by the Seattle Water Department, known as the Central Files. Materials in this collection include correspondence, memoranda, reports, studies, newspaper clippings, deeds and maps. The collection took up 20 boxes, totalling 20 cubic feet.

The collection was originally housed in acidic, flimsy folders. I refoldered all of the documents, using acid-free folders. I labeled these new folders with the collection number (8200-05) and the dates of the documents. I also transcribed the folder titles, although I sometimes gave the folders new titles to help researchers find what they needed. As I did this, I also weeded the collection, that is, I removed duplicate items and items that would better fit in other collections, like pamphlets. The refoldered documents were placed in new, smaller boxes. Each of these smaller boxes is about one quarter of the size of the original boxes, so while the number of boxes in the collection rose from 20 to 45, the amount of space the collection took up actually decreased.

Clockwise from left: Original box, new box, new folder, original folder with documents.

After I refoldered all the documents, I updated the folder list to reflect changes I had made in titles and in weeding. Then it was decided that the collection should follow a strict alphabetical order, instead of the rather haphazard order that it had previously been in. I alphabetized the folder list, then moved the folders into alphabetical order in the boxes.

Using the new folder list and my observations of what was in the collection, I produced a finding aid, complete with historical and scope notes. To see the finding aid, click on the link below:
Seattle Water Department Central Files Finding Aid



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