Standards
for Archival Description: A Handbook
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Standards are interrelated in many ways and the complexity and variety of these interrelationships can be difficult to sort out. This appendix is an attempt to clarify some of the connections among standards through tables that illustrate three of the four types of relationships.
Equivalents. Table B-1 contains a list of U.S. national standards and their equivalents at the international level. When applicable, it also lists equivalent standards adopted by the U.S. federal government and selected equivalent national standards in other countries (particularly Canada and the U.K.).
"Equivalent" standards in each of these contexts may not necessarily be identical to one another; in fact, few are. But all of those listed here are more alike than not; more important, their developers intended them to serve the same functions and often acknowledge their close connections to the equivalent standards in other contexts.
Most of the standards listed in Table B-1 are technical standards emanating from formal standards developing organizations. A few are widely used library-based standards like the MARC formats.
Many of these standards evolved concurrently with their equivalents and the individual experts from each nation often participated in the development at the international level. Sometimes one of the national standards came first and served as a model for the international standard. In other cases, an international standard provided the impetus for the development of a national one. The variations that occur between international and national standards are usually outcomes of making small alterations to accommodate cultural or linguistic factors unique to a specific country.
The U.S. government often adopts U.S. national standards for its own use, especially in the data processing area. These are known as Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS). In some cases, the "FIPS Pubs," as they are commonly known, do not contain any substantive standards text, but merely state that the government has formally accepted a particular U.S. standard. In other cases, the FIPS Pub contains the full text of a standard (as for some code lists), whereas the U.S. national equivalent only contains the rules for constructing the standard.
FIPS can have influence far beyond the federal government because of the government's dominance in the marketplace as a major purchaser of data processing equipment and software. Federal procurement regulations require vendors to meet FIPS specifications so they are often built in to products that are sold in turn to the general population.
Implementations. Table B-2 contains entries for several standards from which others were derived that address specific needs in a particular application or professional context. In other words, a specific user group took the basic framework established in a general standard and developed a specific "implementation" that usually is much more detailed.
Adaptations. Much of the work that has occurred over the last two decades toward developing archival descriptive standards has involved the analysis and adaptation of standards from other fields to meet the needs of archivists. Most of the standards adapted in this way have come from the library profession.
Interdependent. A fourth way in which standards are related is when one specifies that another standard must be used for a particular purpose. For instance, the draft of ICA's General International Standard Archival Description (ISAD(G)) calls for institution codes to be derived by using the two-letter country code from ISO 3166. The USMARC Format for Bibliographic Description contains many similar specifications. Unfortunately, the number and complexity of these dependencies are too great to reduce to tabular format. Instead, considerable effort has been made to indicate these relationships (as well as the other three described above) within the entries for each standard in the main text of the handbook.
Note: Preferred
standards for use in U.S. applications are indicated by shading.
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U.S. NATIONAL STANDARDS |
EQUIVALENT |
OTHER EQUIVALENT STANDARDS |
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AIIM TR2-1992. Glossary of Imaging Technology. |
ISO 6196. Micrographics--Vocabulary [parts 1-7] |
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ANSI X3.4-1986. American National Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) |
ISO/IEC 646:1991. Information processing--ISO 7-bit coded character set for information processing |
FIPS Pub 1-2 |
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ANSI X3.26-1980. Hollerith Punched Card Code |
FIPS Pub 14-1 |
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ANSI X3.30-1985. Representation for Calendar Date and Ordinal Date for Information Interchange |
ISO 8601:1988. Data elements and interchange formats--Information interchange--Representation of dates and times |
FIPS Pub 4-1 |
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ANSI X3.31-1988. Codes--Structure for the Identification of the Counties and County Equivalents of the United States and its Outlying and Associated Areas for Information Interchange |
FIPS Pub 6-4 |
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ANSI X3.38-1988. Codes--Identification of the States, the District of Columbia, and the Outlying and Associated Areas of the United States for Information Interchange |
FIPS Pub 5-2 |
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ANSI X3.41-1990. Code Extension Techniques for Use with the 7-Byte Coded Character Set of ASCII |
ISO 2022:1986. Information processing--ISO 7-bit and 8-bit coded character sets--Code extension techniques |
FIPS Pub 1-2 |
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ANSI X3.43-1986. Representation of Local Time of the Day for Information Interchange |
ISO 8601:1988. Data elements and interchange formats--Information interchange--Representation of dates and times |
FIPS Pub 58-1 |
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ANSI X3.47-1988. Codes--Structure and Data Requirements for the Identification of Named Populated Places, Primary County Divisions, and Other Locational Entities of the United States and its Outlying and Associated Areas for Information Interchange |
FIPS Pub 55DC-4 |
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ANSI X3.61-1986. Representation of Geographic Point Locations for Information Interchange |
ISO 6709:1983. Standard representation of latitude, longitude, and altitude for geographic point locations |
FIPS Pub 70-1 Universal Transverse Mercator Grid (US Army) |
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ANSI X3.138-1988. Information systems--Information Resource Dictionary System (IRDS) |
Draft under development in JTC 1 |
FIPS Pub 156 |
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ANSI/NISO Z39.2-1985. Information Interchange |
ISO 2709:1981. Documentation--Format for bibliographic information interchange on magnetic tape |
BS 4748 (U.K.) |
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ANSI Z39.4-1984. Basic Criteria for Indexes |
ISO 999-1975. Documentation--Index of a publication |
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ANSI Z39.7-1983. Library Statistics |
ISO 2789:1991. Information and documentation--International library statistics |
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ANSI/NISO Z39.9-1992. International Standard Serial Numbering |
See Table B-2, Implementations |
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ANSI Z39.10-1971 (R1977). Directories of Libraries and Information Centers |
ISO 2146:1988. Documentation--Directories of libraries, archives, information and documentation centres, and their data bases |
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ANSI Z39.11-1972 (R1983). System for the Romanization of Japanese. |
ISO 3602:1989. Documentation--Romanization of Japanese (kana script) |
LC Romanization Tables |
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ANSI Z39.12-1972 (R1984). System for the Romanization of Arabic |
ISO 233:1984. Documentation--Transliteration of Arabic characters into Latin characters |
LC Romanization Tables |
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ANSI Z39.14-1979 (R1987). Writing Abstracts |
ISO 214:1976. Documentation--Abstracts for publications and documentation |
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ANSI Z39.15-1980. Title Leaves of a Book |
ISO 1086:1991. Information and documentation--Title leaves of a book |
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ANSI Z39.19-1980. Guidelines for Thesaurus Structure, Construction, and Use |
ISO 2788:1986. Documentation--Guidelines for the establishment and development of monolingual thesauri ISO 5964:1985. Documentation--Guidelines for the establishment and development of multilingual thesauri |
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ANSI/NISO Z39.21-1988. Book Numbering |
See Table B-2, Implementations |
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ANSI Z39.24-1976. System for the Romanization of Slavic Cyrillic Characters |
ISO 9:1986. Documentation--Transliteration of Slavic Cyrillic characters into Latin characters |
LC Romanization Tables |
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ANSI Z39.25-1975. Romanization of Hebrew |
ISO 259:1984. Documentation--Transliteration of Hebrew characters into Latin characters |
LC Romanization Tables |
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ANSI Z39.27-1984 [withdrawn]. Structure for the Representation of Names of Countries, Dependencies, and Areas of Special Sovereignty for Information Interchange |
ANSI/NISO/ISO 3166:1988. Codes for the representation of names of countries |
FIPS Pub 104-1 |
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ANSI Z39.32-1981. Information on Microfiche Headings |
ISO 5123:1984. Documentation--Headers for microfiche of monographs and serials |
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ANSI Z39.35-1979. System for the Romanization of Lao, Khmer, and Pali |
LC Romanization Tables |
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ANSI Z39.37-1979. System for the Romanization of Armenian |
LC Romanization Tables |
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ANSI/NISO Z39.41-1990. Printed Information on Spines |
ISO 6357:1985. Documentation--Spine titles on books and other publications |
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ANSI Z39.47-1985. Extended Latin Alphabet Coded Character Set for Bibliographic Use (ANSEL) |
ISO 5426:1983. Extension of the Latin alphabet coded character set for bibliographic information interchange |
ALA Extended ASCII (used by LC for MARC) |
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ANSI/NISO Z39.50-1992. Information Retrieval Service Definition and Protocol Specification for Library Applications |
ISO 10162:1992. Information and documentation--Open Systems Interconnection--Search and retrieve application service definition ISO 10163:1993. Information and documentation--Open Systems Interconnection--Search and retrieve application protocol specification--Part 1: Protocol specification |
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ANSI Z39.53-1987. Codes for the Representation of Languages for Information Interchange |
ISO 639:1988. Code for the representation of names of languages |
USMARC Code List for Languages |
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ANSI/NISO Z39.58-1992. Common Command Language for On-line Information Retrieval |
ISO 8777 (under development) |
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See Table B-2, Implementations |
ISO 8879:1986. Information processing--Text and office systems--Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) |
FIPS Pub 152 |
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USMARC Format for Bibliographic Description |
UNIMARC |
UKMARC CANMARC LCMARC |
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STANDARD ON WHICH
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IMPLEMENTATIONS |
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ANSI Z39.19-1980. Guidelines for Thesaurus Structure, Construction, and Use |
Art and Architecture Thesaurus Descriptive Terms for Graphic Materials: Genre and Physical Characteristic Headings Library of Congress Thesaurus for Graphic Materials: Topical Terms for Subject Access Medical Subject Headings Moving Image Materials: Genre Terms RBMS Thesauri for Use in Rare Books and Special Collections Cataloging |
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ISO 7498. Information processing systems--Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) |
ANSI/NISO Z39.50-1992. Information Retrieval Service Definition and Protocol Specification for Library Applications ISO 10160 ISO 10161 ISO 10162 ISO 10163 |
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ISO 2709:1981 Documentation--Format for bibliographic information interchange on magnetic tape and ANSI Z39.2 Bibliographic Information Interchange |
USMARC Formats for Bibliographic Description, Authority Data, Holdings Data, and Classification Data (which in turn are implemented by LCMARC, RLIN MARC, and OCLC MARC, among others) UNIMARC Common Communication Format (CCF) |
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ANSI X3.41-1990. Code Extension Techniques for Use with the 7-Byte Coded Character Set of ASCII |
ANSI Z39.47-1985. Extended Latin Alphabet Coded Character Set for Bibliographic Use (ANSEL). ANSI Z39.64-1989. East Asian Character Code for Bibliographic Use (EACC) ALA Extended ASCII |
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ISO 2108:1992. Documentation--International Standard Book Numbering (ISBN) |
ANSI Z39.21-1988. Book Numbering |
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ISO 3297:1986. Documentation--International Standard Serial Numbering (ISSN) |
ANSI/NISO Z39.9-1992. International Standard Serial Numbering (ISSN) |
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ISO 8879:1986. Information processing--Text and office systems--Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) |
ANSI/NISO Z39.59-1988. Electronic Manuscript Preparation and Markup |
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ORIGINAL LIBRARY-BASED STANDARD |
ARCHIVAL EQUIVALENT |
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USMARC Format for Bibliographic Description |
USMARC Format for Archival and Manuscripts Control (USMARC AMC) USMARC Format for Visual Materials (USMARC VM) |
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Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2) |
Archives, Personal Papers, and Manuscripts: A Cataloging Manual for Archival Repositories, Historical Societies, and Manuscripts Libraries (APPM) Graphic Materials: Rules for Describing Original Items and Historical Collections (GIHC) Archival Moving Image Materials: A Cataloging Manual (AMIM) |
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ISBD(G): General International Standard Bibliographic Description |
ISAD(G): General International Standard Archival Description [draft] |
Standards
for Archival Description: A Handbook
© 1994 Society of American Archivists. All Rights Reserved.