Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Descriptive Catalogue of the Documents: Relating to the History of the United States in the Papeles Procedentes De Cuba, Deposited in the Archivo General De Indias at Seville
In the task of making more available to students of American history the vast stores Of materials for that history which are contained in foreign archives, there are three natural stages or processes.
First, there is the summary survey or inventory, in which large masses of papers are represented by brief and often general descriptions, without much effort to enter into details respecting individual volumes or papers.
A second stage is reached when, a summary survey of the contents of an archive having been already supplied, a certain portion or subdivision Of it is selected for fuller description. The type of book usually produced by this procedure is that of the calendar, in which each separate letter or other docu ment receives an entry of a line or more, indicating its date, place of origin, author, recipient, title, or such details, with perhaps some brief statement of its contents.
The third stage of procedure is to select a set or series Of documents having a high value for some particular purpose of history, and to print them at full length.
It is not usually possible, in practice, to draw hard-and-fast lines between the first and the second of these varieties of procedure or of resulting hand book. Many books descriptive Of archival materials partake Of both varieties, and English-speaking scholars have never agreed on any consistent or precise use of terms to designate the different kinds of guides or repertories. There is a broad and general distinction between the survey and the catalogue, but circumstances cause and justify the varying and the mingling of the types. For instance, some series of documents, steadily produced, year after year, by the routine of public administration, may be so uniform in character that they can be sufficiently described in a few lines applicable to all, and that nothing can be gained by doing more, while elsewhere in the Same archive, or even in the same subdivision, chance may have brought together a mass of papers so diverse in origin and so miscellaneous in character that nothing short of an itemized list can have any value for the investigator, or would be thought of by an intelligent compiler.
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