Standardization of Archival Practice

In 1898 Dutch archivist Samuel Muller, Dutch jurist and historian Johan Adriaan Feith and Dutch historian Robert Fruin published Handleidung voor het Ordenen en Beschriejven van Archieven.

This work, which represented the culmination of European archival development up the time of its publication, attempted to impose standardization on archival practice from records management to the management of archival repositories, from the use of archival terms to the preparation of inventories. It was translated into German in 1905, into Italian in 1908, into French in 1910, and into Bulgarian from the French in 1912.  A summary of its contents appeared in Russian in 1925. The work was translated into English from the second Dutch edition of 1920 by Arthur H. Leavitt of the U.S. National Archives in 1940. As Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives, it was reissued in 1968. A centennial edition with a 105-page introduction by Peter Horsman, Eric Ketelaar, and Theo Thomassen was issued in Dutch in 1998. The most recent edition, reprinting the Leavitt translation, with a condensation of the  Horsman, Ketelaar, and Thomassen introduction and a reprint of  Marjorie Rabe Barritt, "Coming to America: Dutch Archivistiek and American Archival Practice", Archival Issues 18 (1993) was published by the American Society of Archivists in 2003.