Bringing archival work into the digital age

A Conversation with Adam Bentz

By Dan Fink

What does it take to organize history? Adam Bentz, director of the Library and Archives, recently updated “Organizing Archival Records,” the definitive guide used by archivists nationwide. He sat down with me recently to talk about how he’s bringing this essential manual into 2026 with new chapters on AI and inclusive practices. The interview was edited for space and clarity.

DAN: Tell me how you got involved in doing a new edition of this book on organizing archival records.

ADAM: When I started at the History Center in 2019, this book was one of the first things Nicole Smith handed to me, saying, “This is our Bible.”

In fall 2022, I received an email from an editor at Rowman and Littlefield Publishers about doing a revised fifth edition. I was suggested by David Carmicheal, the original author. When you’re asked to edit a book that’s been critical to your profession and career, it’s really out of the blue, but also a great honor.

I reached out to David and asked what he was thinking. He said, “I’ve done four editions. I’m planning to retire in a few years. It’s time for the next generation to take over.”

I asked, “Why me?” He explained that I work at a place like the History Center, committed to the local community—not a large research university with dozens of specialized archivists. He said, “Having that focus on small institutions is really the soul of this book, and you represent that.”

DAN: What makes this book so valuable for the work of archivists?

ADAM: Archival work isn’t simply taking old materials from donors and throwing them in a box on the shelf. There’s a lot of care and consideration that goes into it, and this book explains all those procedures in a very approachable way for the layperson.

I’ve spoken to people with no background in archives who have read it and said, “Oh, I think I can do this.” It takes you through the steps from the very beginning, when a donor comes in with a box saying, “I’d like to give this to your organization.” The book walks you through determining if these materials are useful to us, and if so what’s the best way to care for and organize them to make them accessible to the public.

The goal is to break down the mysteries and both properly organize and store collections while increasing accessibility for the public.

DAN: What was the work like to do the revised edition?

ADAM: For the most part, the organizational schema — how to create series, how to label boxes, how to do basic processing — all of that is mostly untouched. But I focused on particular things that have changed since the fourth edition came out. Digital archives, for example. Anything regarding the digital world has changed and will continue to change at a rapid pace.

There was nothing about artificial intelligence, which in the last two years has changed the landscape. I have concerns about AI’s impacts in a lot of ways. However, I think it’s to our detriment in the history field and specifically in archives to ignore it — to pretend it’s not relevant.

Over the last six years, the history field has had to wrestle with big questions about how it’s going to respond to political changes and its responsibility to tell a broader story about the country and communities. I wanted to speak to the fact that organizations like the History Center have worked to establish ties to underrepresented communities…

I included information about AI’s ability to automatically, transcribe, scan and search text and make it much more accessible than previous digital technology. This can be incredibly helpful for researchers but also for archives in cataloging. There are a lot of ways AI can do the grunt work that would otherwise take a long time.

You can look at it the same way as how digitizing newspapers changed accessibility. When I was working on my grad school research, 90 percent of my work with newspapers was done on microfilm. Without an index, you’re talking about a major investment of time to find one scrap of information.

DAN: You’re looking for a needle in a haystack.

ADAM: That’s right. AI is going to make huge amounts of data far more accessible and help us process that information.

DAN: What did you feel was your most significant revision?

ADAM: I’m very pleased with the final chapter about inclusive archives. Over the last six years, the history field has had to wrestle with big questions about how it’s going to respond to political changes and its responsibility to tell a broader story about the country and communities. I wanted to speak to the fact that organizations like the History Center have worked to establish ties to underrepresented communities — communities that just a few generations ago we as institutions didn’t consider significant.

There’s been a big effort to increase holdings on underrepresented groups and to do a better job of telling people’s stories: to be more responsible, respectful, and culturally sensitive. It’s become contentious because that also involves being more honest about negative aspects of history.

We can’t recreate what wasn’t saved, but we can do a far better job collecting records that people are producing now. York County is blessed with a very motivated historical community that wants to do the work. We’ve made contacts with groups, brought them into the History Center, and tried to build trust by explaining that their stories matter.

I also talk about the way various forms of bigotry can be institutionalized — usually not actively by an organization, but because organizations were representative of their time. Some of the language we used in our collections needs to be rectified. Our staff can look at the language in our catalogs and be respectful to where people are today and how they prefer to be described.

DAN: Any other thoughts about what this work means to you personally or professionally?

ADAM: It was an incredible honor to be asked to do this. I hope that what I’ve contributed has made it more relevant for 2026 and the next few years. I hope this continues to serve as an essential manual for people working in small archives and repositories, and I think it will. I hope it puts the History Center on the map as a serious place, which I think we are.