William,
I can't speak for any other organisations that don't differentiate between 'fonds' and 'collections' in their catalogues, but at the BL it was a pragmatic decision. When undertaking a massive retroconversion project on 250 years' worth of catalogue descriptions, mostly created before ISAD(G) was invented and predominantly describing manuscript collections, not archives, we needed to automate the process of extracting multi-level descriptions from hard-copy catalogues. We did not have the resources to revisit thousands of descriptions to check whether they each represented a collection or a true 'fonds'.
Perhaps we should not have used the word 'fonds' at all; what we really needed was a single term that just identified the top level of the description, be it of a collection or true fonds. We do not display the 'level' field visible in descriptions on the public catalogue; however, the information is used by the underlying IT system to generate and display the hierarchy correctly. Whether or not something we hold is a collection or fonds is, I think, made clear in the descriptions themselves.
Of course, if we hadn't had this legacy data to manage, our approach might well have been different. I would be interested to know how others, especially those who have undertaken large-scale conversion projects, have dealt with this.
Regards,
Sandra Tuppen
Dr Sandra Tuppen
Lead Curator, Modern Archives and Manuscripts, 1601-1850
The British Library
________________________________________
From: William Robley [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 04 March 2016 09:28
To: Tuppen, Sandra; [log in to unmask]
Subject: RE: Question about fonds and creator
Surely the whole point of our using the terms 'fonds' and 'collections' is to differentiate between the two, so where is the logic in calling collections fonds? They are obviously two mutually exclusive things.
Regards,
Will Robley
University Archivist
University of Greenwich
-----Original Message-----
From: Archivists, conservators and records managers. [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Tuppen, Sandra
Sent: 03 March 2016 17:49
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Question about fonds and creator
Dear Jane,
At the British Library, our in-house cataloguing system is set up to require the top-level description in any hierarchy to be classed as the 'fonds', whether it be an archive or artificial collection. So we have many so-called 'fonds' descriptions with no creator.
Best wishes,
Sandra Tuppen
Dr Sandra Tuppen
Lead Curator, Modern Archives and Manuscripts, 1601-1850 The British Library
-----Original Message-----
From: Archivists, conservators and records managers. [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Pamela Birch
Sent: 03 March 2016 17:28
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Question about fonds and creator
I admit we use fonds as the top level for all our collections, I don't know how we would could do otherwise. That being the case we currently only use creator in certain fonds level descriptions.
It's not that we don't know the provenance, but the word 'creator' just doesn't seem to fit, we have the same difficulty with the return of accessions to TNA every year.
I admit I probably need to re-read the definition of creator as defined in ISAD(G) but it is one bit we have always had some trouble with given the nature of county record office collections.
Regards
Pamela Birch
Bedfordshire Archives
________________________________________
From: Archivists, conservators and records managers. [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Jane Stevenson [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 03 March 2016 17:10
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Question about fonds and creator
Hi there,
I have another question about catalogue data and best practice….
For the Archives Hub we have decided to make ‘creator’ mandatory if the description is a ‘fonds’ description. This is on the basis that a fonds has to come from a source - it has to have a known provenance so that the archivist is aware that it is an organic whole. We don’t make creator mandatory for a ‘collection’ description, as this may refer to a group of materials that is not from a single source.
However, we have a number of descriptions that are ‘fonds’ where the creator is given as ‘unknown’ or variations thereof.
It seems unlikely to me that the creator can be unknown, because if that is the case, how can we be sure that it is a fonds?
When I’ve raised this a few times with a few of our contributors, I have found that the collections in question are really artificial collections. I wonder whether there is a tendency to call all collections ‘fonds’ even if they are not?
I’d be really interested to hear any views on this.
cheers,
Jane
Jane Stevenson
Archives Hub Service Manager
[log in to unmask]
T 0161 413 7555
W archiveshub.ac.uk
Skype janestevenson
Twitter @archiveshub, @janestevenson
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