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This thesis takes a grounded theory approach in an attempt to seek, articulate and communicate a deeper understanding of the practice known as archival description. In so doing, it also seeks to allow readers to experience for themselves the process through which this thesis took shape, the research journey through which emerged both the questions and the answers. A more detailed exposition of the stages within this process is given in chapter three, which thereby acts as one route map to the whole. Another such map is provided here, in the following brief summary. Undertaking this journey, the questions that emerged included; what does autonomy mean, how is it possible to communicate, to bridge the gap between the separateness of individuals, and ultimately, how is it possible to have separateness without being separate? Then again, the answers that evolved concurrently seemed to lie in using a cybernetic perspective, and employing the concept of autopoiesis or self-production, whereby it is thought possible to become separate without being so. Further, as a result of the questions and answers explored above, a thesis took shape, that practicing archival description is a point of view, one from which it is difficult to lose sight of the observing within the observation, that is to say it is a point of view about how we look at the world and form a point of view in respect of it, about how we know what we know. It is this thesis which will be laid out in later chapters of this work, but first will follow introductions to both the substantive area of interest (archival description) and the approach taken (grounded theory).