The record group, a single series of records, is made up of three subseries as well as a number of smaller groupings of materials. The three subseries are Imprints by date; Imprints by city; and Imprints by checklist number. The smaller groupings include an inventory of state documents, 1851-1878; slips for works not included in the checklist, questionable and phantom imprints, and other problems; and some correspondence and project manuals.
Imprints by date, 1796-1860 (Boxes 1-2) includes inventory slips, most in Style B, arranged by date. Within each year, the slips are in random order.
Imprints by city, 1796-1876 (Boxes 2-4) includes inventory slips, most in Style B, arranged by city and within each city by date. Within each year, the slips are in random order.
Imprints by checklist number, 1796-1850 (Box 5) includes inventory slips for works listed in the published checklist, most in Style A, with editorial notes used in preparing the checklist.
The Michigan Historical Records Survey also published a checklist of New Mexico imprints, but it had been edited elsewhere and no records of this publication are found in the records of the Michigan Imprints Inventory.
The Michigan Imprints Inventory is Michigan's portion of the American Imprints Inventory, a project of the Historical Records Survey of the 1930s and early 1940s. The American Imprints Inventory was begun in 1936 under the direction of Douglas McMurtrie, with the purpose of creating an inventory of early books, serials, and broadsides printed in the United States. The date limit for works to be inventoried varied initially from region to region, but was later revised to include all works printed before the end of 1876.
Historical Records Survey offices in each state conducted the inventory. The inventory was prepared by sending researchers to libraries, where they copied catalog records for all books, serials, and broadsides printed before the cutoff date. Descriptions were prepared in two formats. Works were first described following "Style B," which generally used standard library cataloging conventions. At the request of the national office, older works and works not appearing in standard bibliographies were later re-described, following "Style A," a form of rare book cataloging indicating line ends and ornaments, but not collations. The intent was to publish bibliographies of Style A descriptions for early imprints of each state and major city.
Inventory slips were sent by the state offices to the American Imprints Inventory office in Chicago, where a number of state and city bibliographies were edited and published. When McMurtrie resigned as director in 1941, the imprints inventory project ended at the national level. At that time, inventory slips were returned to the state Historical Records Survey offices in several states, including Michigan, for final editing and publication. The Style A descriptions were edited back to Style B, and the states published "preliminary checklists" covering the work done to that point.
