n.the materials physically and officially transferred to a repository as a unit at a single timeEvans, Harrison, and Thompson 1974, 416ACCESSION. (1) The act and procedures involved in a transfer of legal title and the taking of records or papers into the physical custody of an archival agency, records center, or manuscript repository. In records center operations, transfer of legal title may not be involved. (2) The materials involved in such a transfer of custody.Carnell 2006, 134An accession is an item or group of items that arrives from a single source on a given day and has been deemed appropriate for inclusion in the archives through appraisal.Danielson 2010, 48Accession, either as a noun or a verb, typically combines the roles of acquiring and describing new materials when they are officially added to the archives.an acquisitionJoyce 1990, viiDoubtless this accessions annual will continue to grow over the years as repositories acquire the habit of reporting accessions to it. While there will be instances in which archivists are reluctant to report accessions immediately, there is hope that accessions can be reported as soon as practically possible to encourage research use of collections and references to repositories as archivists become aware of one another’s accessions activities.Boles 2005, 79Every accession, or failure to accession, also has implications that may well go beyond the records at hand.Boles 2005, 144When a repository takes jurisdictional custody of or legal title to an accession, it also accepts responsibility for the care of the records.Millar 2010, 139Alternately, the accession may consist only of a portion of a larger archival whole, such as an annual donation from a resident of the town or regular deposits from a still-operating local business.Carmicheal 2019, 11If Mrs. Smith walks in and donates three boxes of records, these constitute one accession.v.to take intellectual and physical custody of materials, often under legal or policy authorityBrunton and Robinson 1993, 210Where there is reason to question the exact provenance of all the records in the one acquisition, it is best to accession it all as a single unit according to the provenance of the majority of the material.Schellenberg 1996, 110Here it should suffice to observe that an archival institution should not accession records which are subject to restrictions on use that are believed to be unreasonable and contrary to the public interest.Henry 1998, 325Being unable to accession electronic records due to technological problems is analogous to being unable to accession paper records due to irreparable damage.Nash 2010a, 7During these years, archivists rarely accessioned records documenting the experiences of ordinary union members and midlevel union activists.Ryan 2014The new Archivist’s first step was to determine which of the older Federal records the Archives would accession (take legal and physical custody).
Notes
An accession, as noted in the second noun sense, is always an acquisition. That sense is more frequently used in the spoken lexicon than in the written lexicon.
