The value and complexity of collection arrangement for evidentiary work
Archives are invaluable resources for those interested in understanding past activities and events. What makes archival collections valuable as evidence is that they are organized in a way that connects the materials to their creator(s) their associated activities, and recordkeeping systems. In order to create this organization archivists engage in a complex process that involves arranging materials physically and intellectually. This arrangement focuses on documenting the original order of the materials and making them evident to secondary users. The time consuming nature of this process has resulted in a massive backlog of unprocessed (and thus unavailable) collections, which represents an impediment to the investigative activities of scholars and researchers. To help alleviate such a situation, this article presents a novel approach to archival arrangement, using tabletop computers and digitized images. The article explains the project design and implementation and discusses the evaluation results. This work provides several major contributions to the field, including: a new system that allows archival collections to be arranged digitally, new methods and metrics for evaluating archival arrangements, a detailed analysis of the steps involved in archival arrangement and how they correlate with the final outcomes of the process, and a method for analyzing arrangements based on the topologies created by processing archivists.
J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol.