Terminology

In this example, the photograph is from the Charles C. Tiller Collection, which is primarily a collection of photographs about logging and lumbering camps in Dickenson County, Virginia. The accession number of the collection is 106, meaning that it was the 106th collection that the Archives received. The CT number stands for "Charles Tiller," meaning that this photograph is the 25th in the order of the Charles Tiller Collection.

In this example, the photograph comes from the James T. Dowdy, Sr. Photographs, which is a collection of photographs about Southern Appalachian railroad systems, some of which dealt with the lumber industry. The accession number of the collection is 107, meaning that it was the 107th collection received from the Archives of Appalachia. Unlike the photographs in the Charles C. Tiller Collection, photographs in this collection were given Appalachian Photographic Archives numbers but were not given a number within the collection, so the citation has an APA number instead of a collection number.

This website was created from materials found in East Tennessee State University's Sherrod Library, with the majority found in the Archives of Appalachia. Below is a brief description of some archival terms that can be found on this website.

Collection: A set of materials that has been donated by an individual, a family, an organization, or a company to the archives in order to be preserved and/or opened for research. A collection can contain materials in a number of formats, including manuscripts, books, company records, maps, drawings, photographs, letters, video recordings (reel-to-reel, video cassette, beta), sound recordings (reel-to-reel, vinyl albums, cassette, compact disc), etc.

Accession Number (acc.): A number assigned to each collection according to the order in which the collections were received by the Archives. For example, the first collection received by the Archives of Appalachia, the Watauga Personnel and Guidance Association Collection (donated September 29, 1978), is accession number 1. The most recent accession (at the time of this website's creation), the William L. and Gowan Merson Smith Collection (donated April 24, 2003), is accession number 639.

Appalachian Photographic Archives (APA): The Appalachian Photographic Archives is a comprehensive list of photographs that have been numbered, like accessions, in the order that they were processed by the Archives. Some collections' photographs were only given APA numbers; other collections were given two sets of numbers; and other collections were not included in the APA. If the citation for a photograph includes an APA number, that was the only number given to the photograph. If the citation for a photograph has a different number, for example, CT, the photograph has its own number within that specific collection.