Archival collections offer challenges to those charged with their care and management, different from those associated with other types of cultural heritage artifacts. Each is unique, having been created at a particular time, by particular organizations or individuals, as the result of a particular activity or activities. The particular intersection of people, time, actions and events that generates a collection cannot be replicated. If the cultural record contained in each unique collection is to be made accessible, it is necessary to examine, organize, and describe each collection individually. And this must be done with particular attention and sensitivity to the context in which the collection was created, it's provenance.

Over the years, archivists have developed principles governing their actions as custodians of these unique collections. These principles have evolved into common practices that are both flexible enough to accommodate the variety inherent in archives and standardized enough to provide the consistency that is required, particularly in the increasingly networked electronic environment. Over the years, the archival profession has evolved a number of vehicles for education current and aspiring archivists in the subtleties of this work: formal training is offered in colleges and universities, training opportunities abound at national and regional archival conferences, a substantial bibliography on archival practice has developed, and internships and on-the-job training provide necessary hands-on experience.

This publication is intended to serve as an introduction to these more detailed learning opportunities. By mastering the basic concepts outlined here, the reader will be better equipped to take advantage of other, more formal learning opportunities. It serves as an orientation to fundamental archival principles for beginning and novice archivists, and demonstrates how the work of the archivist flows from them. To that end, the publication begins with a discussion of cultural heritage documentation and the nature of archival information and documentation, in particular, as well as the fundamental principles of provenance and original order.

The chapters that follow cover such topics as the characteristics of archival materials and how these shape practice, the gathering and analysis of information that will go into description, types of finding aids, the standards and tools used to create these descriptive tools, and their deployment in information systems. The chapter on Archival Processing describes how the various tasks outlined in the publication fit together to result in the finding aids that provide access to the contents of archival collections. The tutorial provides a narrative description of how an archivist works through the sequence of activities of processing a collection, and illustrates the decision-making process that engages the archivist in this work.

Suzanne R. Warren, Editor