Create a Finding Aid

• What is a Finding Aid
• Organize Your Collection
• Research the Items
• Writing the Finding Aid

What is a Finding Aid?

Finding Aids help people understand what is in a collection, how it is organized, and why the collection matters. Before you get started on creating your own finding aid for the box you selected, watch Melanie Myers explain what a finding aid is, and/or read the information about them on the AJHS website.

Here is a partial list of finding aids for other family collections. How did the archivists AJHS sort their materials?

Organize Your Collection

Now it is time to decide how you will organize your collection. In this step you will want to place the items in your collection into folders with like objects. What will these folders be, though? Archivist Melanie Myers provides some tips in the first part of the video above on how archivists decide to organize a collection. First, notice if there is an order already in the collection that is important. If so, you will want to respect that order. If not, divide the items into like minded categories. These categories will become the “folders” in your collection.

When you are ready copy the items in the box you have chosen and place them in a new google drive folder. Label the folder with the title you are giving the collection. Now add folders to your main folder with the categories you want to use to organize the box. Place the items in the correct folders. (You will notice in Box #1 there are items already in folders: this is because they are parts of the same item.)

Research the Items

In order to create a finding aid for the items donated, you will need to do some research about your people. If the people are famous, a good place to start is JSTOR and google books. You may also find your people in the American National Biography, or if they lived before the civil war in Stern’s First American Jewish Families. If you person is not famous, you may find the census records on Ancestry.com and the Ellis Island records to be a good starting point. Historical newspapers can also be a goldmine of information. Wherever you find your information, keep track of your sources! You will need the citations for your Finding Aid. Zotero is a great free way to keep track of your sources and automatically generation citations in either MLA or Chicago Manual of Style citation format.

Writing a Finding Aid

Now that you have selected the items for your collection, organized, and researched them, it is time to create a finding aid. Here is a great example of a finding aid to use as a model. Click here to copy and edit the below template. Your finding aid should have the following attributes: