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What Is an Accession?

An Accession is the basic building block of The Archiver. Every time you bring a new batch of files into your archive, you create an Accession.

The plain-English explanation​

Think of an Accession like a box of documents arriving at an archive. A donor brings in a cardboard box full of letters, photographs, and papers. That box — all the items in it together — is the Accession.

In The Archiver, an Accession is:

  • A collection of files that were uploaded at the same time
  • From a single source (a donor, a project, an event)
  • Described as a unit — with a title, date range, and description

What can an Accession contain?​

An Accession can include any mix of:

  • Documents (PDF, Word, text files)
  • Images (JPEG, PNG, TIFF, including multi-page TIFFs)
  • Spreadsheets (Excel, CSV)
  • Audio recordings (MP3, WAV, M4A)
  • Video (MP4, MOV)

How Accessions relate to the rest of your archive​

Accessions sit at the bottom of your archival hierarchy:

Fonds
└── Series
    └── Sub-series
        └── Accession ← you are here
            └── Individual files

Once you've created and completed an Accession, you can assign it to a Fonds to place it in your broader collection structure.

What happens after you create an Accession?​

  1. Files are uploaded to secure cloud storage
  2. The AI reads and classifies every file
  3. OCR (text recognition) is run on scanned images
  4. You review the AI's classifications
  5. The Accession is complete and fully searchable

See Creating an Accession for the full step-by-step guide.