Books by Elizabeth H. Dow

How to Weed Your Attic explains why there may be value in items stored in basements, attics, and similar places and describes how to identify historically important documents and artifacts. It gives a general overview of how to take care of historically valuable materials and how to donate them to a historical repository.

Electronic Records in the Manuscript Repository defines the problems related to electronic records and digital documents, describes the steps the curator should take to manage those electronic records and digital documents, and suggests ways to learn the specific skills and perspectives needed to do the job well. It provides an introduction to vocabulary, basic concepts, and best practices to date by collecting and contextualizing data from several real-world projects, and it contains almost 30 pages of references to resources that the curator can consult for information on specific topics. Dow starts with a review of archival concepts, including a look at archival practices, and then discusses the problems created by electronic materials in that context, as well as the research in progress to tackle these problems.

Many archivists work in a repository that cannot consider publishing its inventories on the World Wide Web at this time. They have watched the growing use of the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) for publishing inventories and other finding aids on the Web, and they look forward to the day when their repository will also have a place in the Internet's mega-library of intellectual resources. This book shows those archivists how to create clear and precise archival description in order to start preparing for that day. Dow focuses on the information needed to collect and describe one's collection, where to put it in relation to other information, and what standards to use in the process. Rounding out this publication is a bibliography, a glossary of terms, and an index.

Today, government archivists and manuscript collectors are often in conflict over government-created documents that come up for sale out of private hands. Such manuscripts are often archival material that escaped government control, and government archivists want that missing material back to complete the historic record. Collectors and dealers, however, assert that since the government didn't take care of their documents properly at the time of their creation, they lost the right to claim them now. This divide between government archivists and collectors has become especially acute for ';trophy' documents written by a person of note or about a well-known person or event.Archivists, Collectors, Dealers, and Replevin does not serve as a legal guide to the issues that arise in this divide; instead, it presents both sides of the conflict and examines them dispassionately. The book begins with an historical review of institutional and state-sponsored collecting and the care of historical documents in the United States. The review is followed by a selection of tales of theft and neglect in the past. The third chapter examines the origins and maturation of the archival profession in the United States, and the next discusses the phenomenon of collecting, both as a hobby and as an institutional activity. The fifth chapter provides a general summary of state and federal statutes on public documents in private hands, and with that background in place, the sixth chapter distills the perspectives of the various parties in the struggle. The seventh presents a series of case studies developed to evoke the complexity of these conflicts. The book concludes with steps that holders of public documents can take to avoid conflicts, as well as steps an archive can take to protect its collection.