February Issue - Shades The Magazine

disrupt by moving things around. This is where intellectual order comes in. See, if you have a collection comprising 25 folders, contained in one box, a straightforward list of folder titles, numbered 1‐25 is pretty easy to browse through. But what if you have a collection of 20 cubic foot boxes, or 75, or 500? And what if this collection has an original order that you left undisturbed, resulting in a less than intuitive organizational scheme, where like items and topics are not grouped near each other? That can get confusing and very very long pretty quickly. Reading through 10 or 20 or 1000 pages of folder titles in consecutive order is maybe not the easiest way to Wind what you are looking for. Adding more hierarchy through intellectual arrangement and structured series can help make your container listing and your collection more readily understandable. Embracing the idea of intellectual order can also make your physical arranging and sorting a lot easier. For example, let’s say you have a collection with folders of letters from Mrs. A to Mr. B in box 1 but also in boxes 23, 78, and 174. It might not be practical to place these folders physically together all in one box (because it might disrupt original order, and also because it would take way too much time to do) but intellectually arranging your Winding aid into series by subject or correspondent or alphabetical order can allow you to list boxes 1, 23, 78 and 174 next to one another on paper and make it much easier for researchers to Wind these items.

These days, the standard and ideal form of a Winding aid is one delivered on the internet and encoded in an xml schema called EAD, or Encoded Archival Description. Like any xml document, EAD adds semantic tags that denote Winding aid contents. For example,