Developing descriptive standards: a renewed call to action

Abstract

Just over a quarter of a century ago (1987) Canadian archivists published a call to action. More specifically they called for the development of descriptive standards. Moving forward to today, a number of standards are now in existence, information exchange about holdings is commonplace and archivists have not failed to take advantage (although arguably not full advantage) of the opportunities automation offers. This article provides a selective overview of the history of descriptive standards development to propose that despite a long history of such development, there is still no standard for archival description. To support this perspective, it draws a distinction between information exchange and archival description, and suggests that the use of such a distinction will offer a clearer vision of the area to inform future action.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.