I believe you may be misinterpreting the quote from the DACS manual. It does not mean that artificial collections are to be described identically to "organic" collections (i.e., an archivist should not describe an artificial collection as an organic one).
 
DACS and AACR are data content standards, as opposed to EAD and MARC, which are data structure standards.  Archival description created based upon DACS can be used in EAD, MARC, and paper finding aids. It is designed to provide consistency in a wide variety of areas, including the formatting of dates, punctuation, how to word titles and note fields, etc.
 
Theoretically, the usage of DACS ensures that descriptive data is of a consistent format. Obviously, individual repositories will amend and ignore certain parts of DACS (e.g., a repository containing only synthetic collections may not need thorough descriptions of provenance information). However, one can more easily read and interpret data elements in descriptive records across repositories if they appear in a consistent format.
 
 
 
Mark A. Matienzo, Assistant Archivist
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Center for the History of Physics
American Institute of Physics
One Physics Ellipse
College Park MD 20740-3843
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