About the Guides

Archivists prepare guides to archival and manuscript collections called finding aids. These typically contain a prose description of the collection and the person or organization that produced it, as well as a list of the contents that tells users how the collection is structured and where to find particular materials in it.

The Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections and the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives have finding aids for several thousand of their archival and manuscript collections. The two units have begun to put these guides into electronic format using a standardized encoding system called Encoded Archival Description (EAD) that is coming into wide use in archives.