THEORY AND PRACTICE OF ARCHIVAL DESCRIPTION

Catalog description

This course will introduce students to the theory and practice of archival description, including 1) principles of provenance and original order, 2) hierarchical arrangement and description; 3) standards central to archival description including Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS), Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC), and Encoded Archival Description (EAD); 4) archival authority work, including Encoded Archival Context (EAC); and 5) subject access for archival materials. Other related topics to be addressed include approaches to description of born-digital archival records, management of description programs, design of information systems for archival description, project management and cost analyses, and community-driven archival description such as tagging and reparative description.