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The CA exam has 100 questions and runs 3 hours.
These 10 free CA questions are organized by exam domain, so you can see how each part of the Certified Archivist blueprint is tested. Reveal the answer and explanation under each question.
An archivist is appraising the records of a professional association. The collecting objective is to preserve evidence of how the association governed its activities, rather than chiefly to document its members' lives. Which series most directly serves that objective?
Correct answer: A - Executive committee minutes recording delegated authority and reasons for organizational decisions.
A retiring engineer transfers the project files she kept as her firm's records custodian, along with her personal correspondence. The archives already holds the firm's earlier project files, and the job-number sequence continues across the two transfers. How should the new material be arranged intellectually?
Correct answer: B - Continue the firm's series with accession histories intact; describe personal papers separately.
Three collections document a research laboratory, its parent institute, and a successor laboratory. Staff need a reusable, machine-readable authority record that distinguishes the organizations, records their histories, and expresses predecessor-successor relationships. Which encoding standard is designed for that record?
Correct answer: B - EAC-CPF
The finding aid for an association's records closes personnel files through 2035 but identifies the board minutes as open. Both series arrived in one accession. A researcher requests only the minutes, which have been screened and contain no restricted enclosures. How should staff handle the request?
Correct answer: A - Provide the open minutes; continue enforcing the restriction on personnel files.
During an authorized migration from an obsolete word-processing format to PDF/A, staff preserve the source files and verify that the migrated documents retain the content and layout designated for preservation. The migrated files' checksums differ from those of the source files. What does this finding require?
Correct answer: D - Document the source-to-output relationship and migration event, then establish each new file's fixity baseline.
After a burst pipe, responders have made the storage area safe. A recovery team finds soaked glossy yearbooks and fully wetted magnetic audiotapes. Freezer transport is available immediately, and a media-recovery specialist is on call. What treatment allocation should the team make?
Correct answer: D - Freeze the yearbooks promptly; keep tapes unfrozen and follow the media specialist's recovery directions.
An archives offers workshops to help first-time researchers distinguish a document's claims from conclusions it cannot support. Attendance and satisfaction are high. Which additional finding would most directly demonstrate progress toward the learning objective?
Correct answer: C - Participants improve on equivalent source-analysis tasks scored against consistent criteria before and after instruction.
A processing plan starts with a backlog of 300 linear feet. New accessions add 120 linear feet each year. The archives can devote 960 staff hours annually to processing, at an estimated 4 hours per linear foot. Arrivals and processing are continuous, the rates remain unchanged, and no material is deaccessioned. Approximately how long should the plan allow to eliminate the backlog?
Correct answer: C - 2.5 years
A U.S. archives receives personal letters written to the donor by several living authors in 2016. The signed deed conveys the physical letters and any copyrights she owns; she has never acquired the authors' copyrights. A publisher asks the archives to license full-page reproductions. Which statement accurately describes the archives' position?
Correct answer: C - It owns the letters, but the donor conveyed none of the authors' copyrights.
A pejorative title in a 1970s finding aid was supplied by the archives' own staff; the phrase does not appear in the records. The community described in the collection has proposed an accurate replacement. Which revision respects both the community and the history of the description?
Correct answer: B - Adopt the replacement title; record the earlier wording and revision.
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