Industry Terms

Archive
An archive or individual archive consists of documents created or received by a sole archive creator and collected as a result of this entity’s activities. In practice, single archives are occasionally put together by several creators.

Archive Creator
An archive creator is an institution, organization, authority or other administrative body, operational unit, individual or group of individuals that have put together one or several archives.

Archival Series
Group of archival items that naturally belong together, typically because of a shared function or due to their physical structure and/or organizing principle. A series may also be defined based on its medium and/or format (e.g. maps, drawings, photographs, etc.). The series often relate to one another in hierarchic fashion. A series is typically defined by time period. In the Catalogue, the division into series follows the general archival format, an internal order based on the “significance” of each series. One type of series that frequently occurs in various archives is the “Subject Archive”, which can be defined as “a component of an archive organized by topic, perhaps equipped with an index (archival index or key)."

Archival Item
Unit in individual archive (e.g. a volume of records, parcel, box, etc.); a flexible term that is often defined by packaging.

Folder
Unit belonging to an archival item (e.g. a folder or a set of loose leaf sheets).

Document
The smallest independent unit into which the archival material may be divided. A document is a physical unit that is part of an archival item or a folder. In the Catalogue, few archives are broken down all the way to the document level.

Photographs
“Photographs” are found at many levels in the Catalogue. If you are looking for photographs, we recommend using the free-text option with “foto” included as a search term. Tip: If you place the cursor on the individual hits in your hit list, you can see the contents of each item.

Restrictions
Parts of the archival material kept in the various institutions are restricted, i.e. with limited access. For the public sector, archival elements (archive, series, item, etc.) may be restricted as “confidential pursuant to public regulations (including classified material),” which applies for a term of 60, 80, or 100 years. For the private sector, there are more detailed restrictions. The archival elements may also be unrestricted, which means that the material is freely accessible to the public.