Provenance

Archival material is most frequently organized according to provenance. This means that the collection is arranged and associated with the identity of the original owner/collector, source, creator, or custodian of the primary source material.

This is different from the arrangement of books in a library, where the materials are arranged by subject or topic. At Lehigh, an example of documents arranged by provenance are the papers of Philip and Muriel Berman, recently acquired by the library.