Personal papers organisation

[Maria Clara Assunção]

Dear colleagues
I need your opinion as archivists (far more experienced than me): in a personal archive how would you deal with this situation: in the correspondence of a musician (or a writer, or an artist) you find one or more letters that content literary (or musical, or graphic) material. Would you classify it in correspondance or in the music/literary/artistic related section? Why? Wich are the criteria?

[Pierre-Yves Corbel]

If you apply what we call in France "respect des fonds" you'll have to keep these literary or musical documents in the correspondence, correspondence being considered as a collection containing all possible kind of materials attached to it. If you begin to distract specific materials from the correspondence on account of their peculiar nature, it will be very difficult to draw strict lines.