The following guidelines offer recommendations for a range of practices and approaches to processing archival collections and managing an archival processing program. These guidelines are designed to serve as a foundation for a consistent and efficient approach to processing archival collections across Harvard University Libraries. They are informational, not mandatory, and are not intended to serve as a processing manual or substitute for archival training. These processing guidelines do not provide prescriptive rules or standards for creating archival metadata for/in Harvard University systems.