American Association of University Women. New Jersey Division Records

The records of the American Association of University Women, New Jersey Division (Accession 3231), were received from the organization in the form of several boxes of loose-leaf notebooks, as kept by each president from the 1929-1931 term (the second president) to the 1974-1976 term, supplemented by miscellaneous by-laws, directories and annual reports dated after June 1976. The records arrived in their original binders, with each president represented by l to 3 volumes. When received, the size of the collection was approximately 7 cubic feet, since reduced (by foldering the documents and discarding the binders) to 5.7 feet.

The records received were of three types: 1) those which directly pertained to the president's activities in office: 2) those which pertained to the organization as a whole; and 3) those which recorded the activities of the board of directors. All documents of the first type are included in the subgroup for the president, organized into three series: the ANNUAL REPORTS TO HEADQUARTERS, an ANNUAL MEETINGS FILE, and a GENERAL FILE. Documents of the second type fall into several series: BY-LAWS, ANNUAL REPORTS, DIRECTORIES, NEWSLETTERS, and BRANCH PRESIDENT AND PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT CHAIRMEN'S REPORTS. The third type is comprised of the MINUTES AND AGENDAS in the board of directors subgroup.

The president's GENERAL FILE is where most of the adjustments to the pre-existing arrangement have been made. In general, much of the documentation (by-laws~minutes and agendas) which now forms the collection's other series was kept at the front of the notebooks, followed usually by committee-related material, behind which came the remainder (materials relating to conferences, cooperating associations, projects, etc.). Approximately one-third of the notebooks, however, employed no dividers or headings and those that did often used differing terminology, sometimes at different levels of specificity. For these reasons, certain of the headings in the president's GENERAL FILE have been assigned, standardized or subdivided by the processor of the collection in order to facilitate access to the documents.

Folder headings (the equivalent of the notebook tabs) which have been assigned are enclosed in brackets on the folders (but not in the container list). A heading was assigned only when no heading existed, when a tab was missing from the notebook, when an entire divider appeared to be missing or when the material in the folder was found in another section of the notebook. The assigned headings are based on headings used in other notebooks, on titles of documents in the folder, or on other references elsewhere in the collection (e.g., a contents list or directory).

Standardized headings were used in the president's GENERAL FILE in three instances: 1) "Cooperating Groups" is used to replace several headings with similar meanings. This heading also is used when there are a large number of such groups and the folders for them would not otherwise be adjacent because their existing headings fell in different parts of the alphabet; 2) "Branch President and Board" is always used to designate the mimeographed letters which the president sent to branch presidents and committee chairmen, as this heading is the one which was most frequently used for this purpose by the presidents themselves; and 3) headings for AAUW conferences, workshops and seminars have been limited to: area conferences, creative arts festival, national convention, regional conferences, state presidents conference, state-wide conferences, and workshops and seminars. For standardized headings, the original term used in the notebook has either been written on the front of the folder or it remains as part of the heading, but with one or more added words appearing in brackets.