Manual of Archival Description

Margaret Procter, Michael Cook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780566082580
• eBook ISBN: 9781351920117
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

'MAD3' is the third and latest edition of the influential Manual of Archival Description, revised to take account of a decade of developments in national and international descriptive practice. Many improvements have been made as a result of wide consultation with archive professionals. The Manual remains the only comprehensive British guide to the theory and practice of listing archives held in any format, from letters, photographs and maps to electronic multimedia. New features of this edition include: ¢ additional information on national and international standards which have appeared since the last edition, including data elements mapped to the General International Standard Archival Description - ISAD(G) - which appears as an appendix ¢ coverage of developments in archives administration theory and new access delivery initiatives ¢ extensive updating of sections covering audiovisual material ¢ rewritten chapter on electronic archives ¢ updated dictionary in line with the 1999 ICA definitions ¢ additional examples of listing practice. This standard, authoritative guide to listing and cataloguing is for both generalist repositories and other organizations with archives to manage. As online cross-repository searching becomes a reality, the new edition will enable both professional archivists, records managers and other information professionals to standardize archive listing.

Part I
The Nature of an Archival Description

1
What are archives?

1.1 There has been much discussion of this question, particularly on the point as to whether there is a significant difference between archives and collections of manuscripts. The view taken in this manual is that there is a distinction between these, but that it is significant for descriptive purposes only in extreme cases. The extremes are represented by the following two models:

1.1A The Public Archives Service. This is typified in Britain by the Public Record Office. In this tradition archives are managed by a department of the organization which created the records. Few or no materials other than those created by the governing organization are taken into the system, and the main effort of the archives’ staff is to manage the accrual of new material coming into existing classes, or into new classes created by the originating departments. An important part of the service’s retrieval of information or of documents may be for officials in the employing body, who require the data or materials for administrative reference.

1.1B The Historical Manuscripts Library. In Britain this is typified by the British Library Manuscript Collections. Here the materials are acquired by purchase, gift or bequest from sources external to the library. The materials acquired are appraised, in order to ensure that they deal with appropriate subjects, but do not otherwise have any common history. In many cases the materials accepted are likely to be individual items (such as parchments or volumes) without an organic relationship with any generative system. Users of these materials are mainly members of the public, whose purpose is to conduct research.

1.2 In practice, most archives services combine these traditions to some extent. A common situation is one where accruals of archives are received from several sources. These include the employing organization, but archives (sometimes with periodic accruals) are also received from outside organizations (archival responsibilities being delegated); the archives of defunct bodies are conserved; and manuscripts which are of relevance to the repository’s interests are collected. The local authority record offices in Britain generally follow this mixed tradition.

1.3 The practices and traditions of the two extreme cases are brought closer together by two factors. First, both models are concerned with the acquisition, conservation and exploitation of materials important to particular fields of study. Both the public archives services and the manuscripts departments of national libraries and museums are necessary parts of the overall information resources of the nation. Each is complementary to the other, and to other collections of archives or manuscripts held in non-national, local or private institutions.

1.4 The second factor which brings the two extreme cases together is the fact, empirically observed, that the materials held in each of the two kinds of institution are rarely entirely without some of the characteristics of materials sought for by the other. In a public archives service, for instance, many of the materials received will have some of the characteristics of collections of manuscripts. Archives received as accruals from a record-generating department may be technical reports (capable of being described under bibliographical rules), or even collected manuscript materials.

1.5 In the same way, manuscript collections acquired by a library may display archival characteristics: the papers generated by an individual or by an organization may be acquired as a whole by the library. Such materials have the most important characteristic of archives in that they have been generated by a single system, and were transferred to the archives service as a whole in order that they should be conserved and used within a self-explanatory context. Even though the nature of this transfer may be by loan, purchase, gift or rescue, one may still say that archival responsibilities have been delegated to the new custodian.

1.6 Because there is likely in practice to be no very clear-cut distinction between the two traditions, the view of this manual is that a standard for describing archives should begin by seeking to cover the needs of public archives services, but also go as far as possible towards covering those of manuscript libraries. Where the recommendations of this manual cease to be applicable, it should be possible to apply the rules of bibliographical description.

1.7 In-house manuals of instruction may still be necessary, to ensure that the principles and models indicated in MAD3 are successfully applied to meet the needs and specific practices of particular archives services.

2
Archival arrangement

2.1 The arrangement of archives is an essential feature of their management. This is true of the physical arrangement of materials on the shelves, but it is also true that arrangement is an important part of the intellectual management of the information contained in the materials. It is this intellectual management, or control, with which archival description is mainly concerned.

2.2 It is an important professional duty of an archivist to provide for what Sir Hilary Jenkinson called the ‘moral defence’ of the archives. This means that the arrangement of an archival accumulation should be based upon an analysis of the structure and methods of the originating organization and should display an understanding of the functions of different parts of the accumulation, in their relation to each other.

2.3 This understanding is achieved by studying and recording the original system by which the archives were generated. The archival materials may then be arranged, as far as possible, so as to preserve the original system. Beyond this brief statement, this manual does not deal with the subject area of archival arrangement (except in a brief discussion about classification schemes which lie outside the scope of this manual – see Section 9.9), but it is necessary to remember that this process of analysis and reconstruction is also an essential part of the final system for retrieval of information and exploitation of the archive. The arrangement of archives is an essential preliminary to their description.

3
The function of a finding aids system

3.1 The theory of finding aids can be simply stated. The original materials can themselves only be arranged physically in one particular order, and this should normally be the order which demonstrates or preserves the system which brought them into being. However, users who wish to gain access to the information held in the materials need to have some way of assessing how that information might relate to the subject of their enquiries. The finding aids which help them to do this in effect allow the archives to be scanned in different and various alternative orders. They also provide access points which allow users to find the best place at which to start their search. These tools are the more necessary since users cannot normally scan the original materials themselves, which are boxed and shelved in closed storage.

3.2 Archival description, therefore, is aimed at setting out the various possible arrangements of the materials, as well as the original structural order. By writing down essential descriptive facts about the originals, the archivist is able to create a set of representations, which can in a sense stand in for the originals, and can be set out, arranged and classified in any number of different ways. In information theory, these descriptive substitutes are known collectively as the representation file or files. In real life, representation files in an archival repository are components of a complex finding aids system, in which the individual finding aids take the form of catalogues, lists, inventories, calendars or guides. These are backed up and linked together by retrieval aids such as indexes.

3.3 In effect the creation of one or more representation files enables the material to be arranged in an equivalent number of different ways. However, if descriptions are really going to act as substitutes for the originals, then it is important to ensure that they are effective representations. Moreover, different representations are needed for different purposes. There is a general rule, therefore, that an archival description should contain, as far as possible, just those elements of information which are required for the purposes of a particular representation, and should omit data which is not needed in that particular context, thus avoiding redundancy or confusion.

3.4 The main skill in writing archival descriptions lies therefore in determining the nature and identifying the function of the representation file(s), and then in applying the planned system successfully to the special character of the archives in question, addressing the needs of the users and of the archives service itself.

3.5 Different types of representation files are needed to carry out different functions. Some are to provide administrative control of the material, some to provide intellectual control of the information based in them. Consequently, there may be many representation files used by an archives service. Ideally, they should be combined in a single finding aids system, which may be defined as a set of different representation files designed to control the management and use of an archival accumulation. The general principle is that within one archives service there should normally be a finding aids system which consists of the following:

• web pages providing at least general information about the repository;
• a principal representation file containing descriptions in structural order (that is, a list of any set of archives in an order which demonstrates the original system);
• secondary representation files for administrative control and repository management (for example, accession registers, shelf lists);
• secondary representation files in subject order (for example, a repository guide);
• retrieval aids (for example, ‘instructions to users’, indexes);
• specialized representation files to control processing in specific areas and to describe technically distinct materials (for example, conservation log);
• authority files.

Rules and recommendations for the design of finding aids systems, and for fitting together different types of finding aid, are given in Chapters 5-8.

3.6 The principal representation file, then, should ordinarily be in a structural form; that is, it should demonstrate the archival relationships between the components of the archive: this provides moral defence for the arch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Introduction
• Organization of the manual
• Acknowledgements
• PART I THE NATURE OF AN ARCHIVAL DESCRIPTION
• PART II THE DATA STRUCTURE OF AN ARCHIVAL DESCRIPTION
• PART III MODELS FOR DESCRIPTION
• PART IV TYPOLOGY OF ARCHIVAL DESCRIPTIONS
• PART V SPECIAL FORMATS
• APPENDIXES
• Index