Scope and Content notes

See DACS 3.1 for general guidelines on the type of information that should be added to a Scope and Content note.

Like Biographical/Historical notes, Scope and Content notes should be written in inverted pyramid style, with the broadest and most relevant information at the top, drilling down into more detailed information in subsequent sentences and paragraphs.

A Scope and Content note may exist at any level -- collection, series, sub-series, folder, or item -- and may or may not be supplemented by a more granular contents list. Generally, in the Smith College Special Collections we use Scope and Contents notes at the collection- and series- level to describe meaningful aggregations of information, and only occasionally at more granular levels. Exceptions include for digital content where a large amount of digital content may need to be described in more detail at the file-level, depending; and oral histories, which usually have item-level scope and contents notes (abstracts) describing the context and content of the specific oral history.

A Scope and Content note should focus, first and foremost, on the context of creation and content of the materials being described. So, for example, while a container list may identify a file titled "Elizabeth Banks" with a creation date of 1920, the higher-level scope and content note would tell a researcher that this series consists of correspondence received by the collection creator, Jo Smith, from friends and family members while she was living abroad, and that the topics covered tend to be personal and political, including the U.S. suffrage movement.

A Scope and Content note can also be used to call attention to materials in an aggregation which are unlike the other materials with which it has been grouped, are likely to be of particular research interest, deserve particular attention, or might otherwise be overlooked. The Scope and Content note can be an opportunity to use synonyms or other terms which may be a-historical to the materials themselves, but may be keywords for researchers.

A Scope and Content note should include information about genres or forms of materials being described only to the extent that this illuminates the content or research value of the materials. A scope and content note should almost never contain, and will be incomplete if it consists primarily of, an exhaustive list of genres or forms present in the unit being described. A statement like "The series consists of pamphlets, newsletters, subject files, applications, notes, and photographs," is less meaningful and less useful than a statement like, "The series consists of communication and publicity materials generated by the group in order to share news of its activities and needs to its distant members, as well as applications for funding the group made to grant-funding agencies."