n.an intentionally assembled collection of archival resources with varying provenancesKellar 1939, 28If a man collected other papers than his own and thus established an artificial collection, Mr. Buck thought that since the ultimate users of the varied items would approach them from different points of view he saw no reason why such artificial collections should not be broken up. Mr. D. L. Corbitt thought it was permissible to disarrange an artificial collection if there was no stipulation in the acquisition of the collection not to do so. In many instances such an injunction was present and there was little that could be done about it.Cappon 1952, 197Then there was the work of curators of historical manuscripts. Although they harbored some very artificial collections with nothing organic about them except perhaps some silverfish not yet removed, the curators could boast of family archives, which they would refer to, however, as personal papers.Cappon 1956, 104–105Historical manuscripts can be classified in three categories: (1) bodies or groups of papers with organic unity, in the nature of archives, personal or institutional; (2) artificial collections of manuscripts acquired by a private collector from various sources, usually gathered according to plan but without regard for respect des fonds; (3) individual manuscripts acquired by the repository for their special importance to research and comprising a collection of what, for want of a better term, are sometimes called “miscellaneous manuscripts.” [footnote] Similarity between the second and third categories is evident, although the third as an institutional makeshift is usually more miscellaneous than the gathering of an earnest collector. The association of imprints with manuscripts is discussed later in this paper.Schellenberg 1961, 12Perhaps the only records that do not reflect organic activity are artificial collections of private papers brought together by collectors or by archivists themselves.Gordon 1963, 22Unfortunately many archival acquisitions are artificial collections to begin with. They come from amateur collectors of historical documents, who invariably arrange their holdings according to types of papers. After a while collections of this type become synonymous with the names of collectors, and retain those names even when the papers themselves have passed into the custody of archives. Today archives throughout the country have scores of sizable artificial collections most of which are known to the public under the names of the people who collected them.Evans, Harrison, and Thompson 1974, 426MANUSCRIPTS. . . . Included in the term are bodies or groups of personal papers with organic unity, artificial collections of documents acquired from various sources usually according to a plan but without regard to provenance, and individual documents acquired by a manuscript repository because of their special importance.Gracy 1977, 6A person forms an artificial collection by accumulating material for its intrinsic or other value, not for its documentation of any creator. The material usually has no common origin. Such a collection might be a group of autographs or railroad timetables. A repository too might create an artificial collection from items received at random that are part of no established collection.Gracy 1989, 76That is, [archives] are the documentary production of a creator—the records of organizations and the papers of individuals, as distinguished from artificial collections of documents grouped around a subject interest, such as a gathering of otherwise unrelated items whose bond is simply that they bear the signature of individuals belonging to a special group—say framers of the Texas Declaration of Independence.Hedstrom 1995, 316–317In the past, archivists protected the integrity of documentary evidence by physically keeping together records that were created or collected by an individual or an organizational unit or that were produced as a result of a common business function. Archivists have avoided creating artificial collections of documents around particular topics, people, or places because such collecting practices and organizational schemes reflect the disciplinary, cultural, and personal perspectives of the collector and of the period in which the collection was assembled.NPS 2008, 3Manuscript collections that are assembled from multiple sources or created by different persons or organizations, however, are “artificial collections.” These collections did not accumulate naturally as a by-product of a person or organization’s activities, but were acquired and brought together artificially by a collector.Yeo 2012, 50In 2004, the American descriptive standard DACS claimed to have eliminated the concept of the artificial collection. More precisely, it claimed to have removed the notion that such collections should be handled or described differently from “materials traditionally considered to be organic.” However, the idea of the artificial collection has not disappeared from professional thinking and practice. In DACS, the distinction survives in a rule that the label “collection” should be reserved for “an intentionally assembled collection,” and other archival units should be denominated as “records” or “papers.” In Canada, most archivists assume that any given accumulation is either a collection or a fonds . . .Orchard et al. 2019, 71The question of segregating women’s collections into their own repositories or artificial collections is controversial. Doing so has the ability to draw both attention and dedicated resources to women’s materials.AABC 2021, 43Many archives also house groups of material “collected” for some reason, perhaps by a member of the community or organization, a previous archivist, or a local historian. For example, a member of the local historical society might have collected references to New Caledonia’s railway construction, and in the process he might have removed individual letters, photographs, and maps from larger bodies of material, such as the records of a local construction company which helped build the train station or the papers of a citizen who worked on the railway. Once these items were removed from their original location, their provenance and original order were lost. The records then became an “artificial collection” drawn together from diverse (and often unknown) sources. Trying to return these records to their rightful source or organize them according to any original order might well be a waste of time. Instead, treat these artificial collections as one closed group of records and do not add to them for any reason. Adding new material would simply destroy the integrity -however dubious- of the original collection. Simply keep such groups together as units and use your finding aids to identify their contents.AABC 2021, 57Artificial collections consist of records that have been collected by a person or institution to reflect their interest in a particular subject, medium or type of document, and usually come from a variety of sources. A common example is a photograph collection of an Archives in which photographs have been collected together for easy access, without regard for provenance. While collections are essentially different from an archival fonds, which has been created in the course of a practical activity, collections can be assigned similar descriptive elements, such as title, date, extent, and scope and content.AABC 2021, 163Artificial collection: A body of archival material deliberately brought together for some reason other than in the process of daily activities. Some collections are based on subject content, geographical information, or type of record.Joyce et al. 2022, 118The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University is the university’s largest special collection repository, and its digital library began in the late 1990s with scans from the Photonegative Collection. This artificial collection originally consisted of about 17,000 film negatives created over four decades in response to researcher photoduplication requests.Rawson 2023, 555Unlike traditional archival organization where respect des fonds and original order determine collections, the DTA [Digital Transgender Archive] takes advantage of the affordances of digital archives by creating artificial collections that include items from multiple archives.
Notes
An artificial collection is also sometimes called an assembled collection.
