Archives in the Digital Age

Standards, Policies and Tools

Lina Bountouri

• Publisher: Chandos Publishing
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781843347774
• eBook ISBN: 9781780634586
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Biblioteconomía y ciencia de la información

Archives in the Digital Age: Standards, Policies and Tools discusses semantic web technologies and their increased usage in distributing archival material. The book is a useful manual for archivists and information specialists working in cultural heritage institutions, including archives, libraries, and museums, providing detailed analyses of how metadata and standards are used to manage archival material, and how this material is disseminated through the web using the Internet, the semantic web, and social media technologies.Following an introduction from the author, the book is divided into five sections that explore archival description, digitization, the preservation of archives, the promotion of archival material through social media, and current trends in archival science.- Addresses the most important issues within the archival community, covering current trends and the future of archival science- Presents an original perspective on the use of social media by archival institutions- Provides innovative, interdisciplinary research that incorporates archives and information management- Discusses the dissemination of archival material using semantic web technologies

1

Archival description

Abstract

In this section, the author presents all the necessary tools in order to create a standardized and interoperable archival description. Archival standards, metadata schemas used in archives and digital collections and Knowledge Organization Systems are analyzed in an effort to familiarize the reader with the available archival description options.

Keywords

Archival description; General International Standard Archival Description; International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies; Persons and Families; International Standard for Describing Functions; International Standard for Describing Institutions with Archival Holdings; Encoded Archival Description; Encoded Archival Context—Corporate bodies; Persons; and Families; functions; archival repositories; KOS; cataloguing rules

According to the Society of American Archivists (SAA) Glossary (SAA Glossary Working Group, 2013), archival description is “the process of analyzing, organizing, and recording details about the formal elements of a record or collection of records, such as creator, title, dates, extent, and contents, to facilitate the work's identification, management, and understanding,” and also “the product of such a process.” In this book, the term archival description will be used to express both meanings of the term. Archival description is the most important task of an archivist. The main reason is that the products of the archival description (i.e., finding aids, inventories, registers, indexes, and guides) are the final tools used by the users in order to access the information they are searching for.

Up to these days, archivists around the world have managed to disseminate these tools in printed and electronic formats through the use of standardized forms. Especially in the case of electronic formats, archivists have implemented standards, such as the General International Standard Archival Description (ISAD (G)) (International Council on Archives, 2000), and specialized metadata schemas, such as the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) (The Library of Congress, 2016a), enabling in that way the archival description’s interoperability and exchange in the web environment.

It is a fact that it took the archival community a long time to handle in a homogeneous way the archival description. In the 1970s, the archivists, inspired by the librarians’ efforts that tried to automatically produce a printed library catalogue and exchange bibliographic records between database systems, adopted a version of the USMARC bibliographic standard oriented to the description of archival material, named USMARC Format for Archival and Manuscripts Control (USMARC AMC). As it is mentioned in (Walch, 1994), USMARC AMC is one of the primary standards used for the exchange of information about archives and manuscripts (along with the associated cataloging rules provided in Archives, Personal Papers, and Manuscripts: A Cataloging Manual for Archives, Historical Societies, and Manuscript Libraries (APPM), firstly published in 1993 by the Library of Congress (Hensen, 1989)). Both tools derive from work done in the library community.

After this effort, as it will be presented thereafter, the archival community engaged itself in producing a variety of standards, metadata schemas, and rules targeted to achieve the archival description’s goals. Some of them are the second revised edition of APPM (published by the Society of American Archivists in 1989), the Rules for Archival Description (RAD) that were firstly published in 1990, the ISAD (G) that was firstly published by ICA in 1994, and the EAD that was officially released in 1998.

In this section, I present the tools and guidelines used for the archival description and I categorize them in the following: standards, metadata schemas, cataloging rules, and Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS). Standards form the basis of the archival description by defining the general rules, the basic elements and principles of this task. A standard is an agreement on common principles among multiple parties (Schmelzer, 2009). Nevertheless, standards do not guide on how the archival description products will be created, edited, stored, disseminated, and retrieved. Metadata, on the other hand, are deployed in order to accomplish the aforementioned works. They are aimed at locating and managing resources and they are regularly based on specific standards. This feature makes metadata interoperable and enhances their widely adoption by specialized communities of practitioners. For instance, UNIMARC and MARC 21 are both based on the ISO 2709 standard, while EAD is based on ISAD (G). Therefore, metadata schemas are characterized as data structures.

Cataloging rules and Knowledge Organization Systems are data content standards and tools, given that they provide guidelines on the formulation of data inside the data elements defined in the standards and the metadata. In detail, cataloging rules come mostly from the libraries’ world and they serve the purpose of consistent bibliographic material cataloging. In the archives’ world, the use of cataloguing rules is the same. On the other hand, Knowledge Organization Systems are, according to Tudhope and Nielsen (Tudhope, 2005), classification systems, lexical databases, ontologies, taxonomies and thesauri that attempt to model the underlying semantic structure of a particular domain/discipline so as to enhance search and retrieval procedures. It is worthy of note that the qualitative and systematic implementation of standards, metadata schemas, cataloging rules and Knowledge Organization Systems lead to the generation of complete and valuable archival description records.

At long last, it is important to mention at this point the most widely known associations and organizations related to archives, since they are them that maintain the majority of archival description standards, metadata schemas, rules and policies. Some of them are: (a) the International Council on Archives (ICA) (which was founded in 1948 and its priorities are the effective management of records and the preservation and use of the archival heritage), (b) the Society of American Archivists (SAA) (which was founded in 1936 and its mission is to educate and inform its members, and at the same time, to act as a leading organization assuring the identity, preservation and use of archives in the United States, and (c) the Library of Congress (founded in 1800 and acting as the most important institution for the definition of world widely implemented metadata schemas).

1.1 Archival description standards

The standards presented in this section are oriented to encompass all the contextual entities that surround the archival description: the archival material, its creator, the functions under the operation of which it was produced and the archival repository that holds it. These standards have been developed by the Committee on Best Practice and Standards of the International Council on Archives (ICA) (International Council on Archives, 2014).

Using standards enables the common understanding between description both in the human and in the technological layer, since the use of a specific standard for a given purpose (i.e., for archival description) provides a common ground and acts as a universal language in both layers. Archivists have acknowledged the fact that the archival description must refer to specific standards, which could promote the homogeneity and the interoperability of the archival description.

In the following sections, I will present the most widely adopted archival standards:

• the General International Standard Archival Description (International Council on Archives, 2000),

• the International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families (ISAAR (CPF)) (CBPS—Sub-Committee on Descriptive Standards, 2004),

• the International Standard for Describing Functions (ISDF) (CBPS—Sub-Committee on Descriptive Standards, 2007), and

• the International Standard for Describing Institutions with Archival Holdings (ISDIAH) (CBPS—Sub-Committee on Descriptive Standards, 2008).

ISAD (G) is implemented in order to create finding aids. According to the standard (International Council on Archives, 2000), finding aids are “any description or means of reference made or received by an archives service in the course of establishing administrative or intellectual control over archival material.” These tools—either in a printed or electronic form—are used by researchers aiming to facilitate their search and help them to discover and retrieve the archival material they are seeking for. Finding aids cover a wide variety of access tools such as inventories, indexes, guides, or registers.

In this point, it is of outmost importance to analyze the entities that must be described by the archival standards, aiming to provide a more complete and explicit view of the described archival material. Along with the finding aids that provide information about the archival material, archivists have to provide contextual information to archival users and help them exclude the irrelevant archival items from their search (Janes, 2006). In order to elaborate this task, archivists can implement ISAAR (CPF), which aims at the description of archives’ creators, and ISDF, which aims at describing their functions, activities, transactions, etc. But what is contextual information and why is it important to document?

According to the SAA Glossary, context, along with content and structure, is one of the three fundamental aspects of a record (SAA Glossary Working Group, 2014a). Contextual information is the information for the environment and the conditions under which the archive has been created. In other words, archivists must identify the creator(s) of archive(s) and their functions as well as their characteristics (such as dates and places related to them). As Daniel Pitti mentions “The library community has long had standards for both the description of bibliographic entities as well as for uniquely identifying the individuals, corporate bodies, and conferences responsible for their creation and dissemination. The library community, though, traditionally has concentrated on controlling names, and not on detailed description of the people and organizations bearing the names” (Pitti, 2004). However, the archival material control requires detailed and explanatory descriptions of the contextual entities.

While this information may seem of secondary importance when describing bibliographic material (such as providing information on the publication place or year), when describing archival material, we have to keep in mind that researchers are really interested in knowing the social, cultural, and financial factors that lead to the creation of an archive. In other words, context should be an integral part of the archival description, since it enables users to better interpret the meaning, content and structure of an archive.

Aiming to provide contextual information, archivists could use some of the ISAD (G) elements, usually related to the administrative history or the biography of the creator (Janes, 2006). Nevertheless, providing archival contextual information in separate records than the finding aids seemed to be a better option for archivists, given that in this way they could create more explanatory and concrete contextual descriptions. At the same time, these contextual records could be used by more than one archival institution having in their possession for example two archival collections sharing the same provenance.

The last standard presented is the ISDIAH, which is used to provide information on the repositories holding archival material. Although its usability is in question (as it is analyzed below), it has been implemented by various archival institutions.

It is very important to note that these standards determine the types of information that could be included in an archival description record and provide guidance on how such records may be deployed in an archival descriptive system. The content of the information elements included in the record will be determined by local, national, or international data content standards (such as cataloging rules) (CBPS—Sub-Committee on Descriptive Standards, 2004).

1.1.1 General International Standard Archival Description

The General International Standard Archival Description (ISAD (G)) is the most widely adopted ICA standard, providing guidance for the preparation of the archival description. ISAD (G) can be implemented in cooperation with existing national standards, or in case there is no national standard, ISAD (G) can be used as the starting point for its development. In any case, compatibility with ISAD (G) is considered nowadays necessary so as to provide a universally common ground for the archival description.

The current edition in use is the second edition of the standard, published in 2000 and created by the ICA Committee on Descriptive Standards. The first edition of the standard was published by ICA in 1994. ISAD (G) has been translated in the following languages: Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Spanish, and Welsh.

As already mentioned, ISAD (G) provides guidance on the preparation of the archival description. Archivists collect information that can be used inside the archival description during the various stages of archives’ management, from its creation up to the point that the arrangement and the description stages start. In this context, ISAD (G) has the following targets:

• to define and control the structure of the archival description,

• to define and control the content of the archival description, and

• to facilitate access to the archival material and interoperability between archival information systems.

Aiming to accomplish these targets, the standard defines:

• the multilevel hierarchy of the archival description (which is dictated by...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• About the author
• Prologue
• Introduction
• 1. Archival description
• 2. Archival management software
• 3. Digitization
• 4. Digital preservation
• 5. Promoting archival material in the Social Web
• 6. Archival integration and dissemination: The trends
• 7. Archival information sources: A survival’s kit
• Bibliography
• Epilogue
• Index