Libraries and Archives Editing and Proofreading Services

Archives and libraries are in the business of making things findable by people who do not yet know they exist. That is a writing problem before it is a cataloguing problem. A collection can be perfectly preserved and perfectly arranged, and if the description says only "correspondence and papers, 1911–1954, 14 boxes", the researcher who needed exactly that material will never know. Every hour spent on description is an hour spent on behalf of readers who will arrive long after the archivist has retired.

We edit what libraries, archives and records institutions produce — finding aids and archival descriptions, scope and content notes, biographical and administrative histories, collection-level and item-level records, cataloguing and metadata standards documentation, digitisation project documentation and rights statements, access and reproduction policies, reading room rules and researcher guidance, donor and deposit agreements, appraisal and disposition documentation, records management guidance for creating departments, preservation and conservation reports, exhibition and interpretive text, grant applications and project reporting, and statements addressing culturally sensitive or harmful material in collections. Our editors check that descriptions are searchable in the words researchers will use, and that the institution's own language is examined for terms that have aged badly.

The scope and content note is the highest-leverage sentence-work in the profession. It is what surfaces in a search, what a remote researcher decides on, and what determines whether a collection is used or sits untouched for thirty years. Most are written in the language of the arrangement rather than the language of the material: series, subseries, and the office that generated the records. We rewrite these so the note names the subjects, places, organisations and people the material actually documents, in the terms someone would search for; so the significant strengths are stated plainly — the six years of unpublished field notes, the letters from a named correspondent — rather than left for a researcher to discover; so gaps are declared, because a researcher who travels for records that are not there does not return; and so any access restrictions are stated at the point of discovery rather than at the point of request. Descriptions written this way move usage figures more reliably than any amount of outreach.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including donor agreements, appraisal decisions and restricted material. We are editors rather than archivists or librarians and offer no view on arrangement, appraisal or the application of any descriptive standard. What we can do is make descriptions findable, guidance usable, and public text clear, including for institutions working through how to describe collections created in language they would not use today.