Archival work is essential to preserving a culture, country, or institution's history. While public history provides a public interpetation or preservation of history -- museums, documentaries, monuments -- archives work to preserve and organize historical records for researchers to interpret. Through this couse, students will get a broad introduction to various aspects of archival work, like arrangement, preservation, research services, and management. The class will go on to look at arrangement and description, the foundation of archival work, in great detail through examination of description tools and projects based on the Ridge Archives and their personal collections. At the end of this course, students will not only have a foundation of archival knowledge, but also practical skills that can be applied to future internships or graduate education.