She hired assistants who had graduate degrees in archival administration and who produced inventories based on principles of group description. Early in the 1980s the staff of the university archives started to use computers to produce better finding aids. They developed a consistent format for inventories. They added inventories of individual manuscript collections or university record groups to a master database of finding aids, a database that also includes the collection-level descriptions in this guide and records of new accessions. They produced computerized versions of old finding aids and used computers to generate keyword indexes.
Archivists distinguish between archives and manuscript collections.
The term archives applies both to the old records of an institution and to the office that has custody of them. Any manuscript material that does not fit this strict definition of archival records belongs in a manuscript collection. Traditionally repositories have excluded archival records from published guides to their manuscript collections. This guide contains a list of our archival holdings but generally provides no more detailed description of them. Although this guide emphasizes manuscript collections, it also contains descriptions of our microfilm, photographs, audio-visual material, and printed material.