Instructor:
Jenn Riley
jenlrile@indiana.edu
856-5759

Office hours by appointment

Extra Course Assignment for Students Who Have Not Taken a Prerequisite Course

An understanding of the fundamentals of archival arrangement and description practices is essential to effectively using the EAD markup language for archival finding aids. For most students, completing one of the prerequisite courses, S581 Archives and Records Management (formerly L516, Intro to Archives and Records Management), or S584 Manuscripts (formerly L586, Administration of Manuscripts and Personal Papers Collections), will provide this understanding. For students who have not taken one of these courses, an extra course assignment is required.

The extra course assignment is to read a set of articles describing the fundamentals of archival arrangement and description, and to write a statement of approximately 500 words summarizing the student's understanding of the archival approach to description. This written statement will be due at the beginning of class in Week 2, May 19. Due to the other assignments due at this same time, and to the fact that these principles will be discussed in class in Week 1, students may wish to start these extra readings prior to the first meeting of the class.

Required readings for this assignment:

• Cook, Terry. (1997). "What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift." Archivaria 43: 17-63. http://journals.sfu.ca/archivar/index.php/archivaria/article/view/12175/13184.
• Holmes, Oliver. W. (1964). "Archival Arrangement - Five Different Operations at Five Different Levels." American Archivist 27(1): 21-41. Available through Oncourse.
• International Council on Archives. (1992). "Statement of principles regarding archival description." Archivaria 34: 8-16. http://journals.sfu.ca/archivar/index.php/archivaria/article/view/11837/12789.
• Roe, Kathleen. (2005). "Core concepts and principles of arrangement and description." In Arranging and Describing Archives and Manuscripts. Chicago, Society of American Archivists: 11-25. Available through Oncourse.
• Roe, Kathleen. (2005). "Description of Records." In Arranging and Describing Archives and Manuscripts. Chicago, Society of American Archivists: 71-97. Available through Oncourse.