Draft List of Archive Types

Dear colleagues,

It was nice to see you in Périgueux and I think we had two very good working group meetings there. While we still have some of the enthousiasm left, I would like to share the following with you, namely

an outline for TYPES OF ARCHIVES to use in our database.

The first group of archives is of course the one we all come to think of, namely archives after various individuals active in the field of music

composer
musician (specify instrument in a subfield to make search by instrument possible?)
conductor
musicologist
other (specify and let the thesaurus develop)
family
estate

Then we have different kinds of business archives

publisher
instrument maker
other (specify)

The next group are all the associations

orchestra
choir
other music organization (shall we specify this? I.e. viola society, music teachers etc.)
other organization (specify)

Now comes the complicated bit that varies acccording to country and administration

military archive
judicial archive
church archive
court archive
local authority (specify)
national authority (specify)

Archives after conservatories and opera houses could be entered under the above categoories, but since they can be run by very different organizations i.e. either by the state or privately, I suggest they get their own headings

school
theatre

It may seem to be a lot of work with a list like this, but I can only say that from my own work I know that it is very useful to be able to look up certain types of archives. This is valuable specially when you do not know the name of the archive you are looking for or when you have a customer doing research in a certain field of music.

The list can be longer if we like. Would we like to add for instance:

academies
foundations
journals
ordens
temperance unions
trade unions

There are so many different types. To me we must try to find a balance betwen easy cataloguing and useful search.

Best regards

Inger Enquist

The Music Library of Sweden 2001-08-15