Archival Arrangement and Description - by Lois Hamill (Paperback)

About the Book

Archival Arrangement and Description: Analog to Digital includes historical background, touches on accessioning, standards, technical appraisal for digital formats, incorporates the OAIS preservation model with processing of digital formats, offers a step-by-step workflow and ...

Book Synopsis

Archival Arrangement and Description: Analog to Digital includes historical background, touches on accessioning, standards, technical appraisal for digital formats, incorporates the OAIS preservation model with processing of digital formats, offers a step-by-step workflow and helpful appendices. It concludes with a future possibility and challenge.

Review Quotes

Hamill provides an important and much-needed archival handbook that outlines new and revised strategies and basic workflows for the management, preservation, and access and discovery of a wide array of born-digital records. Hamill's book balances theoretical foundations of archival management and developing digital preservation standards with practical advice on issues ranging from technical appraisal to an overview of EAC-CPF and linked open data in finding aid production. An appendix documenting a chronology of technology changes impacting digital files and a reference list with descriptions of current tools and software for accessioning, processing, file identification, and disk imaging are comprehensive, as is an extensive bibliography listing current readings on digital archiving and data curation.... [T]he provision of practical and instructional advice by way of informative tables, task lists, and text boxes offering sample workflow templates make this work a fundamental reference for students and practicing archivists in any setting. Archivists, librarians, data curators, digital asset managers, IT professionals, digital preservationists, and graduate students studying digital archiving, data curation, and digital preservation will find this an essential work.

Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students through professionals/practitioners.

In this practical-minded publication, Lois Hamill provides much-needed guidance on appraising, accessioning, arranging, describing, and making accessible archival records in digital formats.... Throughout the text, Hamill successfully presents a comprehensive look at the tasks necessary to process digital records, while taking a realistic approach to the application of such tasks at smaller shops with less financial and technical support.... I recommend Archival Arrangement and Description: Analog to Digital whole-heartedly. Hamill's logical viewpoint and her thoughtful program recommendations along the way will help archivists evaluate their current digital records practices and make reasonable, achievable plans for the future.

Lois Hamill's latest book is a compendium of current thinking on digital archival records that offers a range of advice for new and seasoned archivists. Practitioners can use this book to integrate digital object workflows into their more familiar procedures with analog records. Throughout the text, Hamill makes connections to archivists' long-standing practices of using knowledge of their repositories' needs to adapt to their ever-changing environment.

The tools, additional readings, and notes that Hamill provides are more than enough to further the discussion on the topic of digital records and how archives interact with them.

This book is particularly useful for new archivists, graduate students in archival programs, and archivists who are embarking on implementing policies and procedures for arranging and describing their digital holdings. . . Archivists should feel empowered to choose from among the tools and advice presented to create useful supports for arrangement and description that fit within available resources, and to work toward a balance between good enough and perfection.

This book was researched and written over a period of 18 months, and it certainly shows. Although relatively brief, the amount of information contained within this volume is extraordinary. . . Hamill approaches the very daunting task of explaining the complexities of digital arrangement and description with characteristic aplomb and clarity. . . . This book would be an excellent resource for a new archivist or someone just beginning to consider the role of electronic records, but because of its breadth of knowledge and resources, it would also make a helpful guide and bibliography for an experienced digital archivist.

This book's greatest strength lies in its balance between covering the processing of physical and digital materials, and addressing how arrangement, description, and other standard processing practices compare and contrast in the physical and digital realms. . . Overall, this book is a welcome addition to any archivist or aspiring archivist's bookshelf.

About the Author

Lois Hamill is the university archivist and an associate professor at Northern Kentucky University's Steely Library. She has been a practicing archivist for over seventeen years. Her last book, Archives for the Lay Person, was well received, winning a 2013 Kentucky History Award. Hamill is a certified archivist, holds the SAA Digital Archives Specialist certificate, speaks on archival topics at archival library, and history conferences, and is a successful grant writer.