Organizing Archival Records, A Practical Method of Arrangement and Description for Small Archives, Second Edition

This book deals with the practical rather than the theoretical. I found that to be very helpful.

David Carmicheal has written a great work with Organizing Archival Records. This simple book covers the basics of archival arrangement and description. Carmicheal describes the function of archives, distinguishes well between archives and manuscript collections, and offers a step-by-step method for arranging records. This book is a great resource for those who have had no formal archival training. Likewise, it serves as a helpful training manual for an archivist to use in training workers. Carmichael's appendices include a wide variety of examples of finding aids and a number of exercises to use in learning how to arrange records. The one drawback I have found to the book is that it did not include instructions for the CD-ROM, and I have not yet been able to get the accompanying programs on the CD-ROM to work yet, although that could be because of systems problems on my end.

(Postscript, 20 May 2005) I finally managed to get the CD-ROM installed on my computers. The database program worked initially, and then inexplicably stopped working. There is no customer support for the CD. I still highly recommend this book, but I would not recommend anyone to buy it in order to get the software. It seems too unstable.