Managing Your Office Records and Files

Dean Tudor is a journalism professor at the Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute and founding editor of the CBRA.

This is a first-rate basic primer in the area of records management. Other books may serve as in-depth texts, but they do not cover the whole spectrum of what may be called “files.” There are five authors here, and overall responsibility has been assigned to one of them, Katherine Aschner. She writes about the major principles of file management, inventory, filing systems, retention schedules, and automation. The other writers are more specialized; among them, they cover the topics of what to do about maps and drawings, microforms, how to handle disasters, what “record centres” are and how they differ from “corporate archives” and the “library.” In addition to a useful bibliography and a glossary, there are also some sample manuals for inventories and filing. One of the book’s major values is that Canadian examples are used throughout (e.g., the admissibility of microfilm as evidence in Canadian courts).