In the formative years before 1992, both SAHA and the People's History Trust were managed by activists without any formal archival training. These custodians applied techniques more often used in libraries for the collection, arrangement and description of archival materials collected or donated to the organisations. Textual materials were catalogued by subject with little attention paid to preserving documentation in accordance with the original context of the materials, what is often referred to as 'provenance' in archival discourse. After 1992, the principles of provenance began to inform the processing of SAHA material. The collections made accessible before this date could not always be rearranged into separate collections arranged by source or donor. As a result many remained, arranged by subject, in this collection. Due to the subject ordering of this collection, culled from a myriad of sources, for many years this collection was referred to as the "Database Collection".