Practice question · True or false
An archive catalogue is organised by who created the records, so a topic search will miss most of what is there.
Hints
- What is the principle of provenance?
- Records are filed by creator, not subject.
Show the answer
True
Why
True. Archival arrangement follows provenance and original order, so material on your topic sits scattered inside the files of whichever body generated it. Finding it means reasoning about which institution would have had cause to write it down, which is why archival research is slower and less searchable than it looks.
Practise Archives and Paleography
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Archives and Paleography
- Put these European scripts in chronological order.
- A researcher finds no records of domestic servants in a large estate archive and concludes the household…
- Sort each obstacle to reading an old document: is it about the script itself or about language and convention?
- Why is heavy formulaic boilerplate in a legal document a gift rather than an obstacle?
- Archives keep documents in the order their creator used, even when a subject arrangement would be easier to…