What Is a Dossier?
A Dossier is a thematic research folder that pulls together items from across your archive to explore a specific topic, question, or theme.
Dossiers require a paid plan (Pro, Team, or Enterprise).
The plain-English explanation
Think of a Dossier like a researcher's working folder. You're writing a paper about how the Smith family was affected by the First World War. You search your archive and pull together all the relevant letters, photographs, diaries, and documents — from several different Accessions and Fonds — into a single folder just for this research project. That folder is your Dossier.
Unlike a Fonds (which reflects where records came from), a Dossier is created by you for a specific purpose.
What makes Dossiers powerful
Once you've added files to a Dossier, you can ask The Archiver to analyse the whole collection as a unit:
- The AI reads all the files and produces a structured research report
- It identifies themes, key events, important people, significant quotes, and connections
- It can produce a narrative, a timeline, entity cards, and more
- You can ask follow-up questions after the initial analysis
See Quick vs. Full Analysis and Reading Your Results for details.
What goes in a Dossier?
You can add any file from your archive:
- Individual files (documents, images, audio, video)
- Entire Accessions
- Files selected from Search results
There's no fixed limit on how many items a Dossier can contain — but very large Dossiers (thousands of pages) may take longer to analyse.
Dossiers vs. Fonds
| Fonds | Dossier | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Archival organisation | Research and analysis |
| Based on | Provenance (where records came from) | Theme or research question |
| Created by | Archival standards | You, for a specific need |
| Stable over time? | Yes | No — you edit as research evolves |
| Generates | Finding Aids, EAD exports | Research reports, timelines, narratives |