As discussed in the last post, the collection's administrative documentation is vital to future archivists' handling of a collection. There is always the fear of super-imposing one's own bias over a collection being processed.
For this reason, original order is always attempted to be preserved whenever possible. A collection can always be reordered by record group and series in the future; however, once the original order is altered, it can never be reestablished. There is always that possibility that a researcher would come in and be able to make inferences about the creator's by the order of the collection's files and folders.
There is really only one way to know for certain if a collection's original order has been maintained: if we are told this is the case.
Original order in personal papers inevitably is more challenging than original order for institutional papers (now compounded in the digital age). Institutional papers are generally ordered by their type and function and then either alphanumeric and chronology--in some form. Usually, personal paper collections become a hodge-podge of items some in topical order, others and chronological order and others in record type order.
The case of Clarence Gordon Campbell's papers is no different. the organization scheme is partially topical and partially chronological and partially material. For this reason, I decided to maintain the original order and process the collection down to the item level--allowing a researcher to do a crtl-f function to locate relevant materials.
A later archivist may disagree and reorder the collection by record series--my second choice--but that is for posterity to decide. I am hoping that a research will come along, and receive valuable information from this collection's organizational scheme.
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