Archives Hub Blog

Not to be confused with calendar. Archivists use this word for an inventory of items in a collection listed chronologically. The items themselves haven’t been re-arranged this way – a calendar is a description, or an interpretation, presenting another way of looking at the collection. But when calendars in either sense appear on the Archives [...]

Generic name for published documents which are designed to perform a specific task at a specific time, and expected to be forgotten or thrown away after use – although they might be retained for a striking design or as a souvenir of an event. Ephemera include posters, tickets, and leaflets. Does this blog count as [...]

Every archival collection is unique, and the individual documents within them are likely to be unique as well, so it’s essential to establish where a collection has come from, and what has happened to it over time – so that researchers can then judge the quality of the material, and place it within a context [...]

Abbreviation for the word ‘flourit’, ‘fluorit’, or ‘floruit’. The Oxford English Dictionary says ‘floruit‘, but you will probably see these variations, even on the Archives Hub, very sorry about that. Pronounced ‘floor-yuh-it’. When an index term for a proper name requires a date, but if neither the birth nor end date is known to the [...]

A noun, singular, most often pronounced ‘fonz’. This generally just means an archival collection, so when an archival description is at ‘fonds-level’, it’s an overview without details of each individual item. Some archivists simply use the term ‘collection’, or treat the terms as interchangeable. But others reserve ‘fonds’ to distinguish a collection generated by a [...]