n.a finding aidLeland 1941b, 38The Guide will be recognized at once as an invaluable first aid to the scholar who wishes to undertake any investigation in the National Archives; its information, necessarily summary, is supplemented for many fonds by special indexes, inventories, registers, finding lists, etc., originating in the offices from which the records have come, or compiled by members of the staff of the National Archives.Hamer 1942, 84–85Various types of finding mediums, in the form of indexes, registers, and the like, were sometimes made by the agencies which created these records; but for the purposes of the National Archives they are too frequently inadequate.Evans, Harrison, and Thompson 1974, 429REGISTER. (1) The list of events, letters sent and received, actions taken, etc., usually in simple sequence, as by date or number, and often serving as a finding aid to the records, such as a register of letters sent or a register of visitors. (2) (U.S. Govt.) A term applied to the finding aid developed in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress to describe groups of papers, collections, and records by giving their provenance and conditions of administration; scope and general content including span and bulk dates; a biographical note about the person, family group, or organization whose material it is; its arrangement; a container list which is essentially a folder listing; and, on occasion, selective document indexes. See also INVENTORY.SAA 1976, 32The inventory or register of a significantly large and complex collection, however, should have an index unless the alphabetical arrangement of the collection precludes the need for indexing.Campbell 1980, 264An accession register should be maintained, recording the date, title, office, bulk, condition of record, transferring officer or donor, and any restrictions on access.Pugh 1982, 35American archival institutions’ and manuscript repositories have used a wide variety of descriptive media; the forms most prevalent today are the inventory or register, the card catalog, and the guide. In purely archival agencies, the inventory quickly became the basic finding aid; the card catalog is rarely found in such institutions. The card catalog is more likely to be found in manuscript repositories, but even the register is widely accepted as the basic finding aid.a book or record listing information in a consistent formatEvans and Weiner 1938, 189For example, in many states the earliest birth records were in the nature of a register, but when a uniform system of recording vital statistics was adopted, a file of original or duplicate birth certificates was instituted instead.Garrison 1939, 98Jenkinson then prescribes for this danger the accurate keeping of a register, or a listing and summarizing. But he does not reckon with Americans. President Hayes’s staff kept a very good register, listing everything of importance, even letters from private friends, and their disposition.MacNeil 1995, 26The purpose of the registers [known in Italy as protocol registers] is to control the stages of distribution and transit for every official document that passes through the registry. The protocol register, for example, records the document’s protocol number (i.e., a unique identifier), its date, the date when it was received (in the case of documents received), the name and official title of the sender, the protocol number in the office of the sender (if applicable), the nature of the action, an indication of any enclosures and their types, the assigned classification number, and the office handling the matter.Galloway 2021, 165The records that were chosen to be digitized included the minutes of the people who first ran the hospital as well as the registers kept on the patients, which differ over time.
