“Colophons and Annotations: New Directions for the Finding Aid” Review
- O'Light, Michelle and Tom Hry. "Colophons and Annotations: New Directions for the Finding Aid," American Archivist 65 (2002): 216-230.
In this article, the authors address the problem of subjectivity within finding aids. Finding aids by nature are subjective. When archivists create finding aids, a process of selection takes place during which certain important contextual information is left omitted. Likewise, the items included in the finding aid only present one person's view of what is important within it. The authors note that postmodern theory, which stresses relativism and subjectivity, has already been applied to the field of archives in a variety of ways. The theory affected acquisition by making archivists focus on collecting the papers of under-documented groups. It also affected description by forcing archivists to recognize that even in striving to maintain original order, they still use well-developed social constructs for ordering materials. Archival standards actually even help to mask the problem by lending "an aura of objectivity to our descriptions."
Although several responses to the problem have been suggested, these authors contend that adding colophons to finding aids could alleviate the problem. A colophon is a note that occurs at the end of a text and describes how the text was created. Within a colophon, the creator could describe information such as his or her education level and how he or she ordered the papers. Likewise, the use of annotations could allow either the creator or patrons to highlight or describe items within a collection. This could take place in text or electronically.
