For those of you who have not visited our offices (and even if you have), we want to share with you how our hundreds of thousands of items are organized. The History Project’s archives, like those of libraries and archives around the world, uses a standard way of cataloging information on holdings, the Finding Aid (FA). We now have more than 150 of these with more being completed all the time.

As an example, Finding Aid 51 outlines our materials on the Transgender Political Caucus (TPG). As you can see, the Finding Aid begins with a summary of the collection including its extent (2 record cartons), the dates it covers (2001-2008), who prepared the FA (Andrew Elder and Andrew Still Gray), and who funded the preparation of the FA (Mass Humanities).

Next is a listing of subject terms, key words, that help researchers search for the FA and the information it contains. Finding Aid 51 includes the names of people who were involved in the organization (Grace Stowell and Diego Sanchez, among others), subject topics (gender identity and so forth), and the types of items in the collection (brochures, flyers, meeting notes, etc.). This assists researchers to identify if it has information that might be useful to them. There is a biographical note, in this case the history of the TPG.

The bulk of the FA is devoted to the contents each box and folder. These are organized by series. For example, Series I contains TPG’s organizational files. Folder 2 has financial documents, Folder 3 consists of meeting notes, along with a notation that some of these are not dated. Series VI contains ephemera: stickers, flyers, buttons, etc. We will talk more about ephemera in a later bulletin.

As our collections grow, we will be producing more of these Finding Aids and we aim to put them online, enabling researchers and the interested public to see what we house in our collections. These Finding Aids are one of the central ways we preserve history and make it available to the community.