Statement on Co-operation on the
Development and Implementation of Descriptive Standards
Revised resolution, August 2007
At its meeting held in August 2007 the Council of
Australasian Archives and Records Authorities (CAARA) agreed to the following
resolution on standards for the description of archival material:
Recognising that a more standardised approach to
descriptive practice is:
(a) in the long
term interest of all members and the broader professional and user community;
and
(b) likely to
become more important as moves towards networked access are accelerated,
the members of CAARA:
(a) agreed that
they are committed to the ongoing development and implementation of standard
descriptive practices;
(b) agreed to
work together to achieve broad sectoral and cross-sectoral cooperation which
will facilitate Web-based access to standardized descriptions of distributed
archival resources via shared portal facilities such as the Collections
Australia Network; and
(c) agreed that
members would also work towards including descriptive records still held in
agencies as well as those in archives.
In discussing again the issue of
descriptive standards for Australia, members are aware that:
(a) the
International Council on Archives (ICA) has now published the second editions of
its ISAD(G) and its ISAAR(CPF). CAARA is also aware that the ICA has urged
member countries to continue efforts to reach agreed standards of descriptive
practices within their own countries;
(b) there is a
growing level of awareness and use of the Encoded Archival Description (EAD)
standard for the Web-based exchange of standardised machine readable archival
data, both internationally and in Australia. CAARA is also aware of the current
international collaborative efforts to promulgate the companion Encoded Archival
Context (EAC) standard for the machine readable exchange of encoded descriptions
of archival provenance entities and notes the active Australian involvement in
these efforts;
(c) the
Australian Society of Archivists (ASA) Committee on Descriptive Standards has
developed a guide to the Australian ‘series system’, which will be published by
the ASA under the title Describing Archives in Context: A Guide to Australian
Practice; and
(d) the National
Archives of Australia is national maintenance agency for the Australian
Government Locator Service (AGLS) metadata standard, a standard for online
resource description that has been endorsed by all Australian governments and
has been published by Standards Australia as a national standard – AS 5044.
Justine Heazlewood
Convenor
August 2007
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