n.a consistent and normally internal set of data detailing an archives’ acquisition, documenting legal and physical transfer, and supporting descriptionMartin 1955, 318When manuscript material is acquired, the first record made is the accession record. This usually consists of a brief description of the material, its source, its cost if a purchase, and the date of its receipt.Duckett 1975, 114Today, if the curator wants to know the provenance . . . he may consult his accession record, but he may also go to his donor/source file or his collections file, which in a real sense are part of the accession records.Kesner 1978, 29Through accession records and indexed location files, physical control has not proven an insurmountable problem.McAninch 1984, 39With these capabilities, an accession record was developed which tracked such information as accession number, title, date received, donor, record type, processing status, size, span dates, and location.Timms 2009, 79Much of the same information in the accession record is duplicated in the official descriptive record, but in a different format and for a different purpose.Whitaker and Sturgeon 2010, 19One institution had adapted accession records to Encoded Archival Description for all unprocessed collections for posting on Arizona Archives Online.Drummond 2013, 122The accession record for PATCO contains several different versions of inventories, some with notes about content or weeding or lists of boxes that had already been removed. Few of these have dates, but were likely created in the mid-1990s through the mid-2000s.Shein 2014, 16We created an accession record in [Archivists’ Toolkit] that describes the traditional accession information (creator, dates, intellectual content, physical extent, rights, etc.) as well as the digital information.Murphy et al. 2015, 438Larisa K. Miller has argued for eschewing physical processing in favor of creating a descriptive accession record that can be used as a basic search tool for digitized collections.Shein et al. 2017, 6UNLV will be providing public access to collections through resource records but not through accession records, which are created and used for internal administrative purposes only.Flynn 2020, 16Without descriptive accession records, processing collection backlogs becomes much more difficult and time-consuming. Without written accessioning procedures, accession records may vary widely in quality depending on the individuals creating them, which poses a real issue for a field that experiences both high rates of turnover and increasing numbers of longterm staff reaching retirement. The information collected in the creation of accession records provides important context for how collections come to be in archives and how they have changed over time, which influences not only processing decisions, but also issues of ownership, copyright, collection restrictions, and information available to researchers accessing those collections.Chassanoff and Post 2020, 20Accession records typically capture baseline descriptive and contextual information about the materials, such as: title, accession number, the date materials were created, the extent, copyright information, and processing status.Eagle Yun 2021b, 44–45At this point, the accessioning archivist should compile the administrative and descriptive data needed to form the core elements of the accession record. These elements include ¶ • Accession number ¶ • Accession date ¶ • Donor name ¶ • Donor address ¶ • Donor email ¶ • Transfer/gift/purchase ¶ • Fund (if applicable) ¶ • Price (if applicable) ¶ • Title ¶ • Date(s) ¶ • Extent ¶ • Name(s) of creator(s) ¶ • Access restrictions (if applicable) ¶ • Use/copyright ¶ • Custodial history (if applicable) ¶ • Physical condition (if applicable) ¶ • Appraisal notes (if applicable) ¶ • Value score/ranking ¶ • Donor agreement: signed YES/NO ¶ • Location of containersSpring 2021, 97This accrual is entirely paper based, so you will rehouse it in archival boxes, replace any original folders that are no longer serviceable, give it a box-level preliminary inventory, and succinctly describe the contents and means of acquisition in the accession record in the archival management system.
