Archival definitions start with the document.

"A document is recorded information regardless of medium or characteristics and has three components: a physical base (clay tablets, papyrus, wood, parchment, paper, film, computer tape, laser disks); an impression on the physical base, made by either manual or mechanical means (such as a pen on paper or an electrical impulse on computer tape); and information conveyed by the impression upon the base. 'Document' is the usual archival term for a single item." (Trudy Huskamp Peterson, "Using the finding Aids to Archive and Manuscript Collections," in: Teaching bibliographic skill in history: a sourcebook for historians and librarians, ed. Charles a. D'Aniello (New York: Greenwood Press, 1993), p. 267).

"Records are all documentary material, regardless of physical form or characteristics, made or received and maintained by an institution or organization in pursuance of its legal obligations or in the transaction of its business." Records are unique. They result from the activities of the institution." (Peterson, p. 267.) All records are documents, but not all documents are records.

EXAMPLES: baptismal and marriage records of a parish church; minutes of a town council meetings; minutes from the Cabinet Office meetings; Foreign Office correspondence.

"Archives are the records of an institution or organization that are determined to have permanent value either as evidence of the operation of that institution or because they provide important information about people, places, events, or phenomena. In addition, the word archives can also mean the administrative unit responsible for the permanent records or the building in which the records are housed" (Peterson, p. 267). All archives are records, but not all records are archives.

EXAMPLES: the National Archives holds records of the United States government and is a part of the government; the Manuscripts and Archives Department of the Yale University Library holds the records of the university and is a part of the university; the archives of the Banque de France hold the records of and is part of that bank.

Personal papers are groups of documents having some coherence or common identity, but generally without the nature of a complete record characteristic of an archival or records collection. They are " ... documents, but unlike records that by definition originated in an institution or organization, [they] are the private documents accumulated by an individual, belonging to him or her and subject to his or her disposition. Like records, personal papers have an organic unity, for a body of personal papers is formed naturally over the course of a person's life. . . " (Peterson, p. 267).

EXAMPLES: Papers of Henry L. Stimson, of Colonel Edward M. House, of Walter Lippman (all in the Department of Manuscripts and Archives); or of Charles Darwin or Thomas Huxley (available on microfilm in Sterling); or the Spinelli archive (available at the Beinecke Library)

Documents can be formed into artificial collections ; they are assembled from various sources to illustrate an event, a person, or a set of something. The product of deliberate collecting, they, unlike records or personal papers, are not the natural result of business or a life and do not have organic unity (Peterson, p. 268).

EXAMPLES: material related to Charles Lindbergh, a collection of World War II posters, video-taped interviews about the Holocaust (all in the Department of Manuscripts and Archives); the collections of Horace Walpole papers (at the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington, CT) or of Alexis de Tocqueville papers (at the Beinecke Library)

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Acknowledgement
This material is based on the Web site created to support a series of colloquia in historical research offered by the Yale University Library. The initial site was prepared in August 1996 by Suzanne Lorimer, Susanne Roberts, Margaret Powell, George Miles, Fred Musto, Emily Horning, Cesar Rodriguez, Nancy Godleski, Richard Williams, Elizabeth Pauk, and Martha Brogan.

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