Archival inventories as a profession

Abstract

The archival inventory is the highest expression of archival work. It is the most complex and articulated finding aid. To write an archival inventory, it is necessary to deeply understand records in the archive and its creator. The arrangement that is painstakingly achieved through a reordering and inventorying intervention, and then presented in the form of an archival inventory, can be read not so much as a descriptive axiom, but as an open threshold to potential new universes largely unexpressed. In other words, the inventory can only be thought of as the beginning and not the end of an archival practice.