Organising and describing your archive

Organising your archive

After surveying your archive, it is recommended to start organising it, giving it a logical structure so that you can find documents and files easily and efficiently. To do this, you should organise the documents, items and series according to a system defined in advance, taking into account the form, content and context of your documents. For example, you can bring together all the information and documents about each individual and group exhibition, sort the correspondence into chronological and alphabetical order, or collate all the accounting documents.

Think carefully about the system you intend to use to organise your archive and test it. Take into account what works for you as an artist, or for your estate. After all, the documents may already have been grouped according to a certain logic, or you may already have started using a specific system. Consider whether you can continue using this system and adjust it where necessary.

Use the archive diagram (in Dutch) as a guide to organising your archive. Also check the TRACKS website for more information about creating a organisational plan or folder structure.

TRASH DAY or (Digital) clean-up day

Organise a regular clean-up day or ‘trash day’ once or twice a year, to tidy up all the physical and digital documents that have been left lying around. Depending on your priorities, you can choose what action you take. Add the documents to the right place in the structure or folder, tidy up your e-mails and destroy the necessary items according to the selection list.

For more information about organising a clean-up day, check the TRACKS website.

Cleaning up your archive

While you are organising your archive, you may also want to clean it up. Cleaning up the archive is a way to remove all extraneous elements, such as material that does not belong in the archive, duplicates or elements that may damage the documents. It may also be that you have certain documents in both physical and digital format. For example, you may have a paper printout of a report as well as a saved digital version. In this case, you may decide to remove one of the two documents. Do take into account that in some cases, it is worth having both a physical and a digital copy, for example with printed matter (posters, invitations, etc.).

Remove elements that may damage the archive items, such as paper clips, elastic bands, plastic sleeves, ring binders, glue, etc. Also remove duplicates (identical documents) and empty folders.

Applying a selection to your archive

Selection determines which documents from your archive you will preserve or destroy. Making a selection is necessary, because it is not desirable or feasible to preserve all archives in their entirety. It also helps to prevent problems such as the risk of lack of space or structure. Before you make your selection, you need to know the worth and significance of the archive items. A valuation allows you to determine the value and function of a document, a series of archive items, a file or an object within the archive.

Making a selection involves drawing up a selection list, in which you describe which archive items are to be considered for permanent preservation and which for destruction. In this list, you elaborate the choices made in selecting items to remove from your archive. Do bear in mind that there are no clear guidelines available and that the choices will differ from archive to archive. Consult each other on why you might choose to remove an item, and in cases of doubt, you may wish to gain information from the CKV.

A few examples of a selection:

• An organisation might decide to remove administrative and financial documents, such as accounting documents, after the required storage period of ten years, but to keep the logbooks. For exhibitions and projects, you may decide to keep some of these documents, because as well as their legal and administrative value, they also have an artistic and cultural historical value. You can establish this in your selection list. See the section on ‘Valuing your legacy’ in this guide for more information.
• Another example of a choice you may make is how many copies you are going to keep of printed matter such as flyers, publications, invitations and posters. For example, you may agree to archive three copies of each.

Describing your archive

An important step towards using your archive and making it accessible to others is to draw up a detailed inventory. Inventorying is a way of describing things that provides an overview of your archive based on a previously determined order or an archive diagram (in Dutch). It is a tool to make your archive accessible to yourself, the estate and others.

When drawing up an inventory, you can decide for yourself how detailed your description will be. In some cases, a placement list is sufficient. In others, an inventory is made at series or item level. An inventory at series level groups all the items or documents that are similar or created for the same purpose in series, in order to describe them as such. In an inventory at item level, you describe each item separately. The question you may ask here is whether it is relevant for your archive to have such detailed descriptions, and what added value this offers.

To draw up your inventory, you can use the ‘archive diagram’ template (in Dutch) created by the CKV, based on the ISAD(G) Standards. This diagram gives you an overall idea of what components might be present, and it can easily be adapted and supplemented to suit the contents of your archive.

The artistic legacy of the visual artist Walter Leblanc (1932-1986)

During the ‘Art Heritage Legacies’ pilot project, part of Walter Leblanc’s archive was described, organized, and digitized. By gaining a clear overview of the archive and making it accessible, this offers new opportunities for the Foundation to work with it further, reactivate it, and make it accessible to the wider public.

(Walter and Nicole Leblanc Foundation)

Interested to read more? Go to the next page: Long-term preservation of your archive.