Archives

The Canadian Rules for Archival Description (RAD) standard is now just over twenty years old. How well has RAD fared? RAD took over the framework of then-existing bibliographic models for describing library items (AACR2, ISBD(G)) and adapted it for the description of bodies of archives. RAD ’s successes are many and its impact on the Canadian archival profession and system profound. But the bibliographic framework has been abandoned elsewhere in the archival world, and librarians themselves have recently revised it; now we need to liberate RAD from it. The first section of the paper situates the development of RAD in the history of descriptive standards; the second discusses a number of problems with RAD and the difficulty of resolving them in the current framework. Comparisons are made throughout to the post- RAD descriptive standards, as well as to the 2004 effort (not finalized or implemented) to rewrite RAD as RAD2 . The conclusion looks briefly at options for the future of the ...

Half-hour Zoom session given by RD and Alex Garnett COVER SLIDE My name is Richard Dancy, I'm an archivist at Simon Fraser University Archives in Burnaby, British Columbia, and I'll be joined here by my colleague Alex Garnett, Research Data Management and Systems Librarian at SFU Library. In this session we are going to talk about and give a demo of a piece of software called SFU MoveIt that we use in our digital preservation activities. Specifically, It is a tool for packaging digital materials for transfer. Anyone who wants to send digital files to Archives (university staff or private donors) we ask them to use MoveIt to package their files into standardized containers that follow the BagIt specification, which they can then upload to a deposit folder on SFU Vault, which is the university internal file-sharing system. MoveIt is an open-source software, freely available, any one is welcome to download, install, use, or adapt the code for your own purposes, and I'll put the link in the chat after I'm done Alex is the developer of the tool, and he will give a demo of it. I'm more of a user. We wanted to give a bit of context before

Les Règles pour la description des documents d'archives (RDDA) canadiennes ont maintenant un peu plus de vingt ans et il faut se demander si elles ont bien servi. Les RDDA ont été conçues à partir des modèles bibliographiques existants pour décrire des publications (RCAA2, ISBD(G)) et adaptées pour la description de fonds d'archives. Les succès des RDDA sont nombreux et leur impact sur la profession archivistique canadienne, profond. Cependant, ailleurs dans le monde archivistique, on a laissé de côté le cadre bibliographique et les bibliothécaires eux-mêmes l'ont révisé récemment; nous devons maintenant libérer les RDDA de ce cadre. La première section de cet article situe le développement des RDDA dans l'histoire des normes descriptives; la deuxième présente certains problèmes posés par les RDDA et la difficulté de les résoudre dans le cadre actuel. Tout au long de l'article, l'auteur effectue des comparaisons avec les normes descriptives créées après les RDDA, ainsi qu'avec les efforts de 2004 incomplets et non-adoptés pour réviser les RDDA comme les RDDA2. En conclusion, l'auteur examine brièvement des options pour l'avenir de ces normes. La proposition principale est que les RDDA ont besoin d'une révision complète qui pourrait les aligner davantage aux normes internationales, leur permettre de mieux gérer les défis liés à la description des objets numériques et qui pourrait inclure les nouvelles perspectives qui ont été explorées dans les écrits critiques récents au sujet de la description qui ont élargi la notion du contexte archivistique. ABSTRACT The Canadian Rules for Archival Description (RAD) standard is now just over twenty years old. How well has RAD fared? RAD took over the framework of then-existing bibliographic models for describing library items (AACR2, ISBD(G)) and adapted it for the description of bodies of archives. RAD's successes are many and its impact on the Canadian archival profession and system profound. But the bibliographic framework has been abandoned elsewhere in the archival world, and librarians themselves have recently revised it; now we need to liberate RAD from it. The first section of the paper situates the development of RAD in the history of descriptive standards; the second discusses a number of problems with RAD and the difficulty of resolving them in the current framework. Comparisons are made throughout to the post-RAD descriptive standards, as well as to the 2004 effort (not finalized or implemented) to rewrite RAD as RAD2. The conclusion looks briefly at options for the future of the standard. The main proposal is that RAD needs a thorough revision that would more closely align it with international standards, enable it to better handle the ARCHIvARIA 74 (Fall 2012): 7-41 Archivaria, The Journal of the Association of Canadian Archivists-All rights reserved descriptive challenges of digital objects, and accommodate the insights of recent critical writing on description that have expanded the notion of archival context.

My topic is developing archival standards, and in canada that means saying something about RAD, the Rules for Archival Description. The first chapters of RAD were published in 1990, almost twenty-five years ago. What has our standard become, and where should we be going with it? For canadian archivists, RAD is more than just a manual of description. RAD was not the work of one or two individuals, institutions, or committees. Drafting RAD, and then learning, teaching, and implementing it, was truly a national collaborative venture that engaged the archival community from top to bottom, sometimes traumatically. RAD was itself the product of a new national archival network, and in turn it invigorated the network, giving it a common language and sparking a kind of missionary zeal. if today the network is in crisis, it is also the case that the descriptive standard that provided its intellectual sinews has been languishing for some time. And if we are now looking to renovate the one, we should also be looking to renew the other. What has changed since RAD first appeared twenty-five years ago? First, international archival descriptive standards now exist. The archival world was inspired by RAD; the community followed canada's lead, but it chose not to adopt RAD. instead, it used our experience as a springboard to launch something else: the standards developed in the 1990s under the leadership of the international council on Archives (icA). This extensive international effort resulted in ISAD(G) for describing records and ISAAR(CFP) for describing records creators. canadian archivists were involved and played a key role. They ensured that the best elements of RAD found their way into the icA standards, but much was jettisoned and the whole structure was transformed. Are the differences significant? Do they really matter? i think the answer must be yes. in virtually every other archival jurisdiction, including the United States since 2004, the icA standards have become the basis for description; they form the starting point for discussion, for new ideas, practices, and software tools. But in canada we have never made the transition. We are talking only to ourselves, and the result is that our standard is stagnating. renewal means, first and foremost, alignment with the international standards. That brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk