Detail from page 365 of Great Britain, Public Record Office, Calendar of Letters, Despatches, and State Papers, Relating to the Negotiations Between England and Spain, Preserved in the Archives at Simancas and Elsewhere (London: Longman, Green, 1862).n. (also calendaring)a chronological list of documents in a collection or covering a topic, person, or event which may be comprehensive or selective, and which usually includes writer, recipient, places, synopsis, type of document, and page or leaf countFitzpatrick 1913, 29Calendars—of manuscripts, which are briefs of the contents, following the catalogue entry and preceding the bibliographic description, are the best means, next to printing in full, of presenting all the salient points of the papers to the investigator.Fitzpatrick 1913, 30Calendaring.—The most convenient and most easily managed form of calendar entry states the subject heads of the letter or document in the order in which they appear therein in short phrases or sentences separated by semicolons.Martin 1955, 317Checklists, inventories, registrations of record groups, calendars, all are tools for the control and servicing of record collections.Schellenberg 1965, 297Calendars contain substantially more information about records than lists and always relate to individual documents, not to aggregations of documents, such as binders, folders, or volumes. In calendars, such documents are listed in chronological order, and each document is identified by the names of its writer and recipient and described by a digest of its contents.Duckett 1975, 135The calendar is little used by modern manuscript curators because the labor involved has priced it out of the market. Occasionally, they are prepared for small, rich collections, especially literary and theatrical collections which may contain a high preponderance of letters of well-known persons. As its name implies, the calendar is a list of descriptions (not unlike notes), of every document in a collection arranged in chronological or calendar order. Calendars were prepared in the past in lieu of editing and printing documents, but today microfilm editions have largely superseded them.Berner 1984, 249Normally these historical manuscripts—as they became categorized—were placed in subject or form classes and arranged chronologically within. Typically, calendaring was the goal, a process whereby items are arranged chronologically and are accompanied by a synoptic statement. Item catalogues, special subject indexes, shelf lists, and other finding aids gave provisional access prior to calendaring.Douglas and MacNeil 2014, 154By tracing their histories through annual reports, the finding aids themselves, and secondary literature discussing PAC’s descriptive practices during this time, we aim to show how the calendars and inventories functioned as “forms of cultural knowledge” that shaped and were shaped by PAC’s evolving understanding of what it meant to make its holdings accessible to the public and its sense of identity and purpose in relation to that public.Douglas and MacNeil 2014, 157The calendars published with the annual reports often ran to hundreds of pages . . . and included detailed synopses of each single item’s content. Typically, materials were listed first by the volume in which they were bound and then chronologically, sometimes under broad subdivisions. For example, correspondence was often listed chronologically under the name of the correspondent. Each single entry—which related to a single document—included a notation of the date the document was written and the place; an abstract of the contents of the document, which could range in detail and length from a few sentences to several pages; and a page number corresponding to the page number of the volume in which the document was bound.v.to create a chronological list of documentsColeman 1938, 213This type is easier to compile and presents fewer opportunities for mistakes than does the index which calendars the name references in documents. In addition, investigators always wish to see the original record, so that time and labor spent in calendaring is very nearly completely wasted.Bordin and Warner 1966, 51The calendar is the oldest type of finding aid. It is also the least frequently used at present. Since it is by far the most time consuming and expensive to prepare and requires the highest level of scholarship on the part of its maker, the calendaring of papers should be considered only in very special cases. Occasionally a collection of widespread interest to scholars whose volume is small and where the usefulness of individual items lies in the ideas they express rather than in their details will be suitable for calendaring. No one should consider calendaring papers of local interest of a collection of great size where most of the individual items are of relatively slight importance.Berner 1983, 6It was assumed that historians were the main users and that they were best served by chronological and subject arrangements. Historians themselves thought so. The descriptive practice of calendaring responded to this felt need among historians and was a goal in most manuscript repositories before 1940.
Detail from page 365 of Great Britain, Public Record Office, Calendar of Letters, Despatches, and State Papers, Relating to the Negotiations Between England and Spain, Preserved in the Archives at Simancas and Elsewhere (London: Longman, Green, 1862).
n. (also calendaring)
a chronological list of documents in a collection or covering a topic, person, or event which may be comprehensive or selective, and which usually includes writer, recipient, places, synopsis, type of document, and page or leaf count
v.
to create a chronological list of documents