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Business name changes and just what are these standards anyway?



http://www.archivists.org/saagroups/descr/descrip.htm

Like Sally, I'm especially sensitive to standards for description.  The link
above connects to SAA's Description Section's page for descriptive standards,
including APPM and MARC, ISAD-G and EAD and others.  Like others, I recognise
that learning and using these may not necessarily serve the interests of
one's particular situation best, or even be feasible.  But I do think that
some who haven't checked this out might want to at least be _aware_ that
there are standards, and may want to take a look at some before making a
decision.  Desire for consistency with legacy material may be the way to go
for some situations, maybe lack of funding for training and/or education may
be an issue.

If you have any curiosity about these what follows is a basic two minute
intro.  You can delete now or read it and decide where to go from there.  For
the lucky ones with library backgrounds some of this should be familiar.

AACR2 - Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, second edition. (This incredible
project was a joint thing between Americans, Aussies, Brits and Canadians.
Hurts my head to think about how those meetings must have gone.  The first
edition was 1967; the second edition was 1978; what I use is a 1988 revision.
 This is somtimes called AACR2 and a half.  Yes, it gets cumbersome to say
sometimes.) These are the basic guidelines that libraries use for
cataloguing.  Yes, there is a chapter that addresses manuscripts.  Chapter 4.
 It became apparent that chapter 4 didn't really seem to fully and adequately
address the irregularities that so often occur with archival material.
Hence, APPM, or

Archives, Personal Papers and Manuscripts, by Steve Hensen, 1983.  I myself
am using the 1989 second edition, sometimes just referred to as Hensen's.
(Yes, this is the same guy who is currently president of SAA.)  This is
probably the "biggie" in archival cataloguing in the US and deservedly so.
It's invaluable for anyone who's been trained in traditional cataloguing but
is suddenly faced with that really strange stuff--archival material--that
doesn't come with traditional publication info on its title page and title
page verso (back of the title page).  Not many manuscripts come with titles
and authors stamped on the covers.  Most I've seen come in boxes labelled
"Seagrams"  or "Jack Daniels."  This is not particularly helpful unless you
have the Seagram's archives or maybe Jack Daniels' papers.  Maybe not even
then.

Consider also that the Canadians have their own set of descriptive guidelines
for archival material.  Rules of Archival Description, or RAD.  I can't tell
you how many times I've heard it called RADical, but I can assure you it's
thorough.  If you're into fonds, this is for you!  And unlike AACR and APPM
this one's online.  See link above and go from there.

These manuals were designed to address traditional cataloguing and were
compiled without regard for MAchine Readable Cataloging (MARC).  I should
rephrase that.  These were the guidelines whether you use card records or
MAchine Readable records.  Granted, some of those bigger research libraries
(with all kinds of funding that the rest of us can only dream about... ) had
stuff going into MAchine Readable Cataloging earlier on, but as other
institutions began catching up more cataloguers were using additional manuals
that addressed the standards for applying these guidelines to conform to
MARC.

OCLC (stands for a variety of things depending on when you're talking about
it.  Originally it was Ohio Cooperative for Library Cataloging, or maybe I
have the Cs reversed.  Today it's Online something similar.  Somebody help me
on this one.  Too many palm trees today.)  created manuals for stuff
(records) put into their system.  They used to have eight standard formats,
but they "integrated" them in the mid 1990s.  One of the formats was AMC
which doesn't stand for Archives and Manuscript Collections; rather it stands
for Archives and Manuscript Control.  You'll still find that some places use
"familiarity with MARC:AMC" in job announcements, but it's become sorta
shorthand for asking for someone who's familiar with doing MARC cataloguing
for archival stuff.  Inserted in the back of my MARC:AMC manual is a gift
certificate to a delightful chocolate boutique in Richmond, VA.  But most
manuals don't.  I have a 1986 manual.  I think the first was 1984.

So much for the cataloguing.  I'll try to keep the finding aid standards
shorter.  In case you read this Monday morning right after Daylight Savings
Time starts.  I really think it's the very worst Monday morning of the year.

ISAD-G translates into English as _General International Standard Archival
Description_, 1994, second edition adopted September 1999; published by the
International Council on Archives.  Yes, we have international standards,
too.  At the risk of over-generalising, this is rapidly becoming a standard
for finding aids.  Just as using APPM makes MARC "markup" pretty cut and
dried (just transfer the appropriate stuff into the appropriate fields and
subfields) if one has created finding aids using ISAD-G, coding it into EAD
is relatively painless.  Note I said relatively.

Uh, oh!  Now for EAD, or Encoded Archival Description.  I have a choice here
of getting really longwinded, or chickening out!  EAD is a markup language.
If you've figured out much about HTML (Hyper Test Markup Language) then you
may have heard that it's a subset of SGML (Standard General Markup Language).
 SGML is more of a conceptual thing than a tangible thing.  Think Platonic
Forms.  I personally believe that Plato was the first to philosophise
virtuality.  Never mind.  HTML just makes things bold, big, italic, and puts
things in tables or gets triggered to run little animation routines.  Okay, a
bit more than that.  HTML in itself doesn't know which words in a text are
names, places or dates or anything else.  EAD can take a finding aid and make
an intelligible sense of how the parts are related to each other.  Think
linking and nesting coding.  If you run a search you can zero in on what ex
actly you're looking for where.  Like in an online catalogue.  More efficient
searching.

Metadata and Dublin Core are for another day.  I'm going to bake some bread.
I was supposed to chicken out before the last paragraph anyway.  Now y'all
can take turns correcting me on the above.  My two minutes are up.

Apologies for the hanging prepositions,

Holly Hodges
just outside Houston, TX

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