Descriptive Standards: Information and Documentation
Cataloging Manuals/Standards
Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules. Known as AACR2. See the web
page for the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of Anglo-American Cataloging
Rules.
Describing Archives: A Content Standard. Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2004. Designed to replace APPM (Archives, Personal Papers, and Manuscripts, compiled by Steven L. Hensen, 1984) as a descriptive standard. More information may be found on the SAA
Publications web page.
International Council on Archives standards. Known as ICA.The International
Council on Archives is "a non-governmental organization, acting internationally,
which is concerned with archives and their role in the conduct of public and
private activities, the protection of individual rights, the advancement of
human knowledge and culture."
The ICA's
Committee on Descriptive Standards has created the following standards:
Marion Matters, Oral History Cataloging Manual. Chicago:
Society of American Archivists, 1995. More information may be found on the SAA
Publications web page.
The Canadian Council
of Archives' Canadian
Committee on Archival Description publishes Rules for Archival Description,
known as RAD. For the most recent published revision, see
this page
Jeff O'Brien, of the Saskatchewan Council of Archives, has created a web
page covering the basics of RAD.
Metadata Standards
Categories for the Description of Works of Art. Known as CDWA. A
product of the Art Information Task Force, which developed guidelines for describing
works of art and their visual and textual surrogates. See their web
site for more information.
Dublin Core. A 15-element metadata element set intended to facilitate
discovery of electronic resources. Originally conceived for author-generated
description of Web resources. See their web
page for more information.
Encoded Archival Description. Known as EAD. A document type definition
of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) used in marking up archival finding
aids. Information on EAD and the EAD Finding Aids Project is available from
the EAD web site maintained by
the Library of Congress.
For more information on EAD, see the SAA's EAD
Round Table home page.
Thesauri
Art & Architecture Thesaurus. Known as AAT, and available online.
"The AAT is a comprehensive vocabulary of nearly 120,000 terms for describing
objects, textural materials, images, architecture and material culture from
antiquity to the present."
Library of Congress Thesaurus for Graphic Materials. Known as LCTGM.
Available online. A thesaurus
consisting of 6,037 terms and numerous cross references indexing visual materials.
Thesaurus of Geographic Names. Known as TGN. Available online.
Hierarchically arranged geographic data with records for approximately 900,000
places.
Union List of Artist Names. Known as ULAN. Available online.
The ULAN is a structured vocabulary tool, with approximately 200,000 names representing
100,000 individual artists and architects.
MARC Cataloging
Describing Archival Materials: The Use of the MARC AMC Format,
edited by Richard Smiraglia. New York: The Haworth Press, 1990. More information
may be found on the SAA
Publications web page.
Marion Matters, Introduction to the USMARC Format for Archival
and Manuscripts Control. Chicago: Society of American Archivists,
1990. More information may be found on the SAA
Publications web page.
The official MARC Standards
pages are maintained by the Library of Congress.
For more information on MARC, as well as many useful links, see the home page
of MARBI, the
Machine-Readable Bibliographic Initiative Committee, which is an interdivisional committee of
American Library Association.
For reports from SAA Liaisons on various description and catalgoing initiatives, see here .
Suggestions for other resources?
Contact diane.ducharme@yale.edu
Society of American Archivists
Description Section
Web Liaison | Diane Ducharme
Created | 30 January 2004
Last Updated | 10 August 2005
|
