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Developing descriptive standards: a renewed call to action

Bunn, JJ; (2013) Developing descriptive standards: a renewed call to action. Journal of the Society of Archivists , 34 (2) pp. 235-247. 10.1080/23257962.2013.830066. Green open access

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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.

Type: Article
Title: Developing descriptive standards: a renewed call to action
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1080/23257962.2013.830066
Publisher version: http:dx.doi.org/10.1080/23257962.2013.830066
Additional information: © 2013 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The moral rights of the named author(s) have been asserted.
Keywords: standards, archival description, metadata, information exchange
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Information Studies
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1410302
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