Archival educator Hunter updates his 1997 edition with this expanded version. As one of the best comprehensive introductions to archival practice, this book just got better with the updated and additional information. Used as a basic text, this book offers the student or staff member a full scope approach to dealing with archival materials from appraisal to preservation.
Updates include revised documentation strategies, the latest research on preservation storage and handling, security and disaster planning after September 11, 2001, a discussion of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, major revisions and an expansion to address the rapidly changing digital landscape, and an updated and expanded bibliography to feature literature from Australia and Canada.
Additions include new sections dealing with Encoded Archival Description, the Internet, international perspectives on appraisal and refinements to U.S. theories, three appendices (a case study, the Code of Ethics for Archivists, and the Academy of Certified Archivists’ Role Delineation Statement for Professional Archivists), and three new chapters on audiovisual archives, management, and the archival profession.
In each chapter Hunter includes references to literature published since the first edition and integrates international scholarship. There are new photographs and quotes from popular newspapers and magazines that demonstrate the importance of archives in different walks of life.
The layout of the new edition is similar to the first. However, the publisher must have reset the type because typographical and design errors in the new edition displayed fine in the earlier one. There are whole lines of type in several figures that have dropped out in the second edition. Typographical errors in the first edition remain in the second. New chapters introduce their own typographical errors.
Substantively, I found only two errors and one omission. In the chapter on preservation, Hunter mistakenly calls digitizing a preservation treatment when it is really an access option; digital media are not permanent, nor an accepted archival preservation format. He also suggests full encapsulation without deacidification which actually speeds up deterioration. In his discussion of Encoded Archival Description, Hunter fails to mention that the new version 2002 supercedes version 1.0.
Despite the typos and errors which I trust he will correct and more closely proofread for a third edition, this expanded version is a welcome addition to introductory works on practical archival applications. Recommended for classroom use and for continuing education of staff in libraries and archives.