On the numbering

Several correspondents have asked why the finding aid lists fourteen items when the box contains eleven. The answer is procedural and not especially interesting, but it is worth setting down once so that we can point to it later.

An archival inventory is prepared at the time of transfer. It describes what was in the box on that day. If material is separated afterward (refoldered, loaned, pulled for reproduction, or simply misplaced) the inventory does not update itself. The numbering therefore records a collection that existed at a particular moment, not the collection as it stands. This is ordinary, and I want to be clear that it is ordinary.

The three items not present are described in the inventory as a blueprint, a sheet of correspondence, and a bound report of twenty-two pages. We know what they were because the inventory says so. We do not have them.

I would note only that Item 8 in our box is sheet 4 of 4, and that sheet 3 is described in the inventory as Item 11. The two were together when the list was made and they were not together when the box reached us. Somewhere between those two moments is a transfer, or a loan, or an afternoon when somebody took the folder apart and put most of it back.

The inventory is undated and unsigned, which makes it difficult to say when either moment was.