“Organizing Archival Records: A Practical Method of Arrangement and Description for Small Archives,” Book Review

• Carmicheal, David W. Organizing Archival Records: A Practical Method of Arrangement and Description for Small Archives, 2nd ed. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004. 

David Carmicheal's Organizing Archival Records is one of the best guides available for aiding archivists of small institutions in processing their collections. The book is simple, short, and practical. Carmichael not only describes the process for arranging and describing collections in this work, he also provides practical helps such as case studies and exercises that flesh out exactly what he is describing. Additionally, the book contains a CD-ROM that includes a database system that a small archives can use to manage its collections. This book provides a solid basis for training new workers in archives on how to process collections, and because of its brevity and lack of technical jargon, even a new worker should be able to read it within the span of an afternoon. If a new archivist of a small collection consumes this book and Yakel's Starting an Archives, he or she will be well prepared to set up and run their archives in an acceptable fashion.

Carmichael divides the book into three sections that deal with the purpose of organization, the levels of organization, and the steps of organization. In short, Carmichael says that the purpose of organizing collections within an archives is to help researchers find the answers to their questions. He notes that archival materials cannot be arranged and described in the same way as books because they were not created like books, they need more security than books, they are generally more complex in subject matter than books. Thus, organization for archives is much more different than it is for books, although the purpose for organizing both types of materials is similar.

Carmichael divides the levels of arrangement into four categories: record group, series, file unit, and item. He adequately describes each category, and he offers fairly detailed instructions for how to determine the boundaries of series within a collection. He notes that archivists typically discover series within a collection rather than creating them. He stresses the need for distinguishing between archives and manuscript collections. For him, the main distinction between the two lies in who created the materials. If an institution produced the records, then they are archives. If they were papers created or accumulated by an individual, they are manuscripts. While this distinction is a bit simplistic, Carmicheal's point works extremely well in the type of small archives one might find at a church or a historical society. He also briefly explains the basic steps of accessioning materials.

Carmichael divides archival processing into twelve basic steps that one could adjust to fit almost any small archival institution. The steps are well thought out, and provide a thorough workflow for processing. The processing workflow begins with assigning a number to the collection. After this, the archivist researchers the collection and complementary materials to discover such things as who created the collection, when it was created, and what types of materials it contains, and what subjects it addresses. The archivist uses this information to name the collection and to produce initial paperwork that describes the collection in a basic manner. The archivist progressively works through the collection to a greater and greated degree, determining what series are in the collection and how the files are organized. At the end of the process Carmichael describes, the archivist has fully processed the collection, created a brief usable finding aid, labeled and shelved the collection, and created a catalog entry.