n.descriptions of or information about archival resources made available through tools or systems to enable discovery and useBerner 1978, 171Series level description provides intellectual access to a mass of records that are related parts of a series and which relate one series to another.Dollar 1981, 126Burke’s first assignment was to study the system of records in the National Archives and to design a computerized system that would provide both physical control (location, volume, record type, etc.) and intellectual access in the form of finding aids.McCrank 1981, 286There is an affinity, however, between archivists, manuscript curators, rare book librarians, and curators of other media (prints, photographs, maps, etc.), and perhaps also museum curators, which should be exploited in this first-stage of automation. These professionals share common concerns in linking intellectual access to physical retrieval through time.Cook 1985, 235The emerging computerized information systems in archives and the increasing information sharing among repositories will be hollow shells indeed if the controlled vocabularies governing intellectual access to archives are not legitimized.McCrank 1986, 74The process of intellectual access in either an archives or a library is based on abstraction and use of a surrogate to retrieve ideas not records, or stated differently, to locate information about information resources.Bearman 1987, 62Data elements from the physical and intellectual access portion of the records holdings data (location, technical access requirements, etc.), from archival functions data (such as time of action or status), from authority data (index terms) and, occasionally, from the data about the control record itself (such as the control record number), augment physical and intellectual description in the end-user record.Gracy 1989, 75The physical presence of information-bearing records is not the same as intellectual access to those records. To be known, information in records requires the patient, skilled attention of an archivist arranging and describing the records to unlock the information in them by providing a way to it.Cain 1993, 45If a collection contains a large run of chronologically arranged correspondence on a wide variety of topics, the archivist will not rearrange the papers to suit a researcher who may wish to read only letters on certain topics or exchanged with certain individuals. Instead, the archivist seeks other tools, such as selective name and content indexing, to provide intellectual access and linkages in a way that the physical arrangement of the papers cannot.McCrank 1993, 301Scribes reverted to managing loose manuscripts as authentic records in series, and they devised other means of intellectual access parallel to classification, cataloging, and book indexing.Kaplan and Mifflin 1996, 120The “Visual Resources” chapter of the Guide to Indexing with the Art and Architecture Thesaurus lays out the theoretical issues underlying these practical problems eloquently, but offers no facile solutions: ¶ “Managing intellectual access to visual resource collections involves the coding or translating of the information inherent in those items, primarily information about the cognitive and/or aesthetic content of the subject depicted. . . .”Grimsted 1998, 132Crucially important for opening access to archives is what western archivists often call “intellectual access”—reference facilities that effectively and efficiently assist researchers in preparing for work in the archives, lead them to appropriate documents, and help them understand their archival context.Pasterczyk 1998, 20Information retrieval consists of two components: intellectual access and physical access. Intellectual access is knowing, specifically, that certain information exists. Physical access is actually obtaining it.Martin 2001, 18Archivists are providing intellectual access to their collections not only through on-line library catalogs and national bibliographic databases such as OCLC and RLIN, but perhaps most significantly in the form of finding aids mounted directly on repository web sites.Dow et al. 2001, 293–294To enable scholars and nonscholars alike to retrieve those documents effectively, web publishers need to know how to provide intellectual access to their documents, i.e., to assure that potential users can find documents through what may involve several layers of discovery.Prom 2003, 201Archivists had one overriding goal in developing these standards: furthering intellectual access to geographically dispersed collections. This goal was a natural outgrowth of early movements to develop union catalogs for archival resources, such as the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, and to bring order in an era of large projects for special subject surveys.Dow 2005, 98The publication of finding aids and primary documents on the World Wide Web has brought together in one file the methods and perspectives of two traditional ways of providing intellectual access to historical materials: creating a surrogate for the material and creating a map of the contents of the material.Mason 2007, 212In selective harvesting, several areas have already come under scrutiny for further workflow efficiencies where business process change and automation will assist: permissions (for example, the capacity to generate emails using data and templates in the harvesting tool to speed up workflow and enable responsiveness); quality review (for example, the capacity to tune the crawler to achieve more effective crawls resulting in less post-harvest fixing, and the capacity to visualize harvest results that would aid appraisal decision making); and description (for example, the capacity to automate cataloging, attribution of metadata, and/or full-text indexing to augment intellectual access).Jimerson 2009, 16Archivists provide intellectual access to information about the repository’s holdings (e.g., finding aids, bibliographic databases, and web access); information from holdings (particularly for remote user access or in-house administrative queries); information about records creators; and referrals to sources outside the repository.O’English 2011, 1The past decade brought a revolution in intellectual access to archival collections through the emergence of the online finding aid. These tools, created in a multiplicity of formats (EAD, HTML, PDF, and others), have made it possible for researchers anywhere to use an Internet connection to find materials in archives.Irwin 2016, 102In many aspects of managing oral histories Technical Services found it advisable to follow advice in the Guidelines for Processing Collections with Audiovisual Materials by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Their recommendations stipulate, “the objective is not to record every bit of technical metadata possible for AV media, but to provide enough information to enable intellectual access (the user should know what the content of the recording is), and physical access (the user and reference staff should know how to access the material.).”Oestreicher 2020, 65Intellectual access comprises written and descriptive information about the repository, collections, creators, and related resources. In other words, it encompasses all the information needed to find, use, and access collections. There are many ways, both virtually and in print, to share this information, including websites, finding aids, catalogs, inventories, databases, online collections, research guides, and indexes.
