Acquisition and Accession Practices

 


ACQUISITION: An addition to the holdings of an archive, whether received by transfer under an established procedure (ie. records schedules used in a government or corporate setting). by deposit, purchase, gift or bequest.

Types of Archives and Corresponding Acquisitions Practices

  1. Institutional repositories: (e.g. CIBC Archives)

    • those that accession records directly from the parent or corporate body, better known as "in-house" archives
    • a records management program entailing records retention and disposition scheduling

  2. Collecting Repositories: (e.g. a university library's special collections branch, the local history department of a public library, Ukrainian-Canadian Archives, etc.)

    • field solicitation and donor contact
    • records derived from hundreds of sources/creators

  3. Hybrid of 1 and 2 (e.g. Archives of Ontario)

Means of Acquisitions

  1. Scheduled Transfer
  2. Donation/Deed of Gift
  3. Purchase (least common)
  4. Bequest
  5. Deposit

 

ACCESSION: The formal acceptance into custody of an acquisition, and the recording of such an act, as opposed to de-accessioning which is the process by which an archives formally removes material from its custody.

The Accession Sheet

 

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