Arhiv Jugoslavije - Finding aids

Researchers are informed about the contents of the archival holdings through indexes, inventories, guides, register files, catalogues, resumes and other information media.
An index offers information about archival holdings before they are organized and processed and it holds a brief description of the content of folders, boxes or packages and an index of business and administrative books.
An inventory offers information about processed and organized archival holdings and is an official document that determines the property of the archives. Depending on the number of offered information, inventories may be general, summarizing and analytical.
A general inventory offers an insight into all funds and collections in the archives, providing information about the contents, structure, general state of the holdings and their number, tasks done on them and about information media.
A summarizing inventory provides a concise description of units within a fund or collection. An analytical inventory provides detailed descriptions of the contents and external features of objects of some documents in the fund.
In addition to the summarizing and analytical inventories, registers of names, geographic registers, and registers of objects, real, chronological and combined registers are also made as additional forms of information media.
Guides provide concise information about the history and contents of holdings from one or a group of funds up to the level of the entire archives of a state.
Register files provide a concise summary from the contents of the document, its file name, date and place of creation, name of the addresser and addressee and external markings (type, form, language, script, mode of reproduction, material on which it was written and number of pages).
Catalogues are information media that may consist of any part of archival holdings, starting from parts of individual documents to the funds of one or several archives. Depending on the number of information and way of processing of data, catalogues can be systematic (information about the contents of archival holdings are grouped according to branches of science and fields of activity), focused on subjects and topics (data are grouped according to topics or problems within a science or activity), focused on subjects (data are grouped according to questions, notions, persons or geographic names), chronological (data on a certain event are grouped according to periods, years and dates) and focused on names (contains only names and family names of persons, pseudonyms of state officials and researchers, artists, authors, etc.).
An insight into holdings can be obtained by examining funds that contain the list of all funds from one or several archives.