 Welcome to Burns Library. In this video, we will show you how to navigate a finding aid, but remember that you can always contact us for help or drop in for a consultation if you have questions. What is a finding aid? A finding aid is the most common way for an archival primary source collection to be described. Think of it as a high-level inventory, like a table of contents of materials in a collection. The way that finding aids are organized is different from collection to collection and from library to library. Burns Library provides direct access to finding aid to the library database. When you search for an archival collection, you can click on the find aid link from the search result. Click on the title to open up a brief description, like you do for books. For most archival collections, you'll find links to the find aids at the top and bottom of the description page, as well as the permanent URL to the finding aid included in the description. This is the find aid for the Bernard and Margaret Hayes letters of Burns Library Boston College. Some of the description in the finding aid you can also find in the entry in the library database, but there's a lot more detailed information in the attached PDF finding aid. Many find aids will have front matter where you can find a lot of useful information that provides context for the overall collection. The title page includes the title of the collection and the inclusive dates, which is the total range from the oldest to the newest document in the collection. Some collections also have bulk dates, the range of years where the majority of the collection is from. The title page also includes a unique identifier for the collection, a permanent link to the document, and which repository this is from, and contact information for that repository. After the table of contents is the summary information, it lists the creator, who created this, who collected these documents, why were these brought together, the physical description, how many feet of paper are in this collection, how many boxes, the language, what languages are the papers in, and important to check, do you have reading knowledge of that language, the abstract, which is the high-level summary of the collection, and the preferred citation. What pieces of information you should include in your citation so that future researchers can track down this material? The administrative information includes publication information, when was this fine made made, restrictions on access, is this open for research, are there parts you can't use, provenance, how did the library get this material, who collected it, and what biases and gaps that create in the material collected. Existence of surrogates, is it available in a derivative material such as digital, microforms, or use copies, restrictions on use, are there restrictions on quoting or taking photographs of this collection, and related material, what other collections are available and similar to or related to this collection content. The historical note, or biographical note, provides background information on the creator of these records. Who is this personal organization? When and where did they exist? What type of things were they involved in? What other names or organizations is it important to know about when looking at the records? Note how archivists cite their sources so that you can look for more information. The scooping content is a summary of what types of things and formats you can expect in this collection. It will not tell you everything that is included, but it can give you a sense of what the majority of the collection focuses on. The arrangement note is how these things are organized. Where in the collection inventory should you start looking? Okay, with all those things reviewed you are starting to get the context for the list of what's contained. The collection inventory can be the longest part of the finding aid. This is how you start figuring out what boxes you want to see from this collection. It can branch from extremely detailed describing each item in a box to very high level just telling you roughly how groups of boxes are organized. After each description note the box number and folder number if available of the inventory line. That's what you want to ask for when you come to the reading room. If it's available online you'll also see a link to digitized content and you just click on that instead. Let's say my research question is how did the United States government treat widows as civil war soldiers? What pensions or benefits were they given? What would I want to see from this collection to answer that? I know from the biographical note the Margaret Hayes was widowed in 1864 so box one folder 11 treasury departments certificates and vouchers 1865 to 1867 is most likely going to be records of payments to Margaret Hayes as a widow. So I'd check there first. Okay now it's time for you to try this. Go to the URL on the screen to go to finding aid for yourself.