In general, an archive comprises the original, unique, and irreplaceable, documents and records generated by an organisation or individual in the course of their activities, that are selected for preservation based on their enduring value, and then transferred to, or deposited in, the CCCA service. An archive can be corporate or personal, or it may comprise a diverse set of miscellaneous collected documents and ephemera. It is important to note that CCCA does not itself create the archives collections. Our role is to appraise, acquire, preserve, and carry out the professional archival processing and controls needed to keep archives secure, and appropriately accessible.
See Deposit Archives to view our Collections Acquisition Policy
We preserve over 1300 individual archives. Many unique aspects of the social, political, commercial and cultural history of Cork are documented in our collections.
A new archive is accessioned as a collection into the CCCA. The process involves an archivist carrying out a full preservation, appraisal, and sensitive material/privacy/data protection assessment, the full documentation of provenance, content and physical and intellectual structure, cleaning, damage treatment, boxing and shelving or incorporation into digital storage. Items that are in poor condition are earmarked for professional conservation repair treatment. (See also: Richard Dowden's scrapbook project for an example of recent document conservation work)
The object of archival processing is to ensure, and preserve, both the physical and intellectual order and accessibility of an archive. Final processing takes place when an archive is fully listed and indexed and made available for research.
