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In a number of countries, the application of computers to archival finding aids has triggered a great deal of research and development aimed at solving some of the larger problems of technology and methodology associated with this new means of handling archival information.

Much of this research has been widely covered in the professional and technical journals including ADPA, the journal of the ICA's Committee on Automation, and the Archival Informatics Newsletter edited by David Bearman (USA) both of which deserve to be brought to wider attention.

The technology is developing very rapidly, however, and in some countries so are archivists' responses to it. It is becoming unsafe to place too much credence even in articles which were written only a few years ago, since many of the problems and developments which they describe have already been overtaken by events.

This report could not attempt to provide a summary of all research completed or in progress. The more limited purpose of this chapter is to highlight three of the principal areas which, to judge from returns to the questionnaire, are of greatest current concern to archivists:

(1) The formulation of nationally and internationally agreed standards covering archival description including the control of terminology and authorities used in the validation of archival information.

(2) The means of communicating automated archival information nationally and internationally, through the development of data exchange formats and networks.

(3) The development of new technology such as optical disks and multi-media presentations.

Standards for archival description in general

[Note: throughout this section, in conformity with much current literature on the subject, the term 'standards' is used in a generic sense, to cover all kinds of rules, conventions and guidelines. Official Standards, properly so-called, promulgated by national or international Standards organisations are denoted, as in this sentence, by the use of upper case.]

Unesco expert consultations

In October 1988 under the auspices of Unesco and ICA, a meeting of experts was convened at the National Archives of Canada to discuss current trends in description standards. A number of weighty general issues were addressed including the need for any kind of standards in this field; the extent to which archivists could follow or adapt mainly bibliographical and documentation standards from the related information professions; the roles of the International Standards Organisation and of the International Council on Archives.

Detailed attention was paid to the structure, content and interpretation (value) of archival information; to the various 'levels' at which archives may be described and the depths of description and elements of data appropriate to each level; to the need to establish (and enforce) authorities, for example for the control of terminology and subject headings and for the verification of such descriptive elements as the names of persons, places and organisations the functions of the archive-creating entities and the forms of material.

Papers were presented outlining current concerns and research in the participating countries, with particular reference to developments in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. A report of the meeting's resolutions was published in the ICA Bulletin of December 1988, pp.71-72. Among these was a recommendation that ICA should establish a working group to develop international standards for the description of archives.

As a first step towards this, a planning meeting was called by Unesco and ICA in Paris in December 1989. This commissioned work on a Statement of Principles for archival description, approved the establishment of a working group by ICA and set as initial objectives of the group the discussion and agreement of the Statement of

Principles, the preparation of general rules for archival description and then more detailed discussion of a standard for description of the highest level of archival entity (fonds etc). It is foreseen that the group's work will include the identification of data elements and the compilation of a glossary of terminology. A commentary was also commissioned on three current or forthcoming publications about which more will be said below: the second edition of Steven Hensen's Archives, personal papers and manuscripts (society of American Archivists 1989), the first three chapters of the Canadian Rules of archival description (forthcoming) and, from the United Kingdom, the second edition of the Manual of archival description ('MAD2') edited by Michael Cook and Margaret Procter (1990).

As the work proceeds, full consultations with the appropriate regions, sections and committees of ICA are envisaged.

Standards actually in place

Unesco requested that the present survey should take full account of these discussions. A general survey of standards relating to archives, few of which however are directly relevant here, was published in an earlier study in this series (Roper 1986; see also Rhoads 1982).

In order to discover the actual situation in the field, respondents to the questionnaire were invited to list any standards applicable in their countries to (a) the cataloguing or description of archives in general, (b) the control of vocabulary and terminology in such description and (c) the exchange of data about archives.

In many cases little or no thought has yet been given to these matters and archival description remains overwhelmingly a matter for local practice, informed by basic manuals on archive administration, guidelines issued by archive training schools, or general works such as ICA's Dictionary of archival terminology (Walne 1988). Some developing countries are explicitly awaiting a lead from the developed world or from the international community.

Despite the continuing work of the International Standards Organisation (Rhoads 1982; Thacker 1988), there are as yet no widely accepted international norms specially applicable to archival description. Respondents made little reference to the existing ISO documentation and bibliographical standards.

In those countries where determined efforts have been made to agree national norms, the degree of their authority varies from Standards promulgated by the national Standards institution and rules enshrined in national archive legislation, through rules or recommendations of the central direction of archives (where such a body exists) or of individual archives, to recommendations, guidelines and advice promulgated by learned or professional bodies.

In the United States a working group on archival description standards has recently drafted a definition of archival description as well as a useful matrix, shortly to be published in a special issue of the American Archivist, by means of which it will be possible to categorise any existing standards according to whether they are technical Standards, conventions (rules), or for guidance only, whether they are in origin internal or external to the archive profession, and whether they concern data value (the terms or elements used, authority files, etc)' data contents cataloguing rules and guidelines), data structures (formats) or information systems.

Whatever their status, the greatest problem everywhere seems likely to lie in their enforcement.

For archival description in general only China, Norway and the Soviet Union among those responding to the questionnaire reported specific national Standards. In Sweden some control is exercised through the national archive legislation. In a number of European countries including France, Italy, Norway and Sweden the national archives promulgates rules or suggestions for the arrangement and description of archives. Portugal is proposing the adoption throughout the country of a scheme of description based on the Manual of archival description (see p.45).

In countries where there is no central direction of archives, such as the USA and the UK, it is the professional bodies and individual archivists who have mainly been responsible for promoting such norms or guidelines as might apply. In the USA the strength of readymade rules for librarians, notably the Anglo-American cataloguing rules 2nd edition, has been too great to ignore, and a number of state and university libraries in particular apply these rules to the description of their archival and manuscript holdings.

The Public Record Office (UK) notes that its map catalogue 'takes account of' AACR2. On the whole, however, these Rules have been found unsuitable for archive and manuscript applications, and both in the USA and Canada they have been or are being revised and amplified for application to archives.

Canada: towards descriptive standards

Working towards a national computer network for archives, Canada's archivists have first moved deliberately through a step-by-step analysis of the techniques of archival description.

This work entered a new phase with the creation of the Canadian Council on Archives in 1985 and the appointment of the first salaried Description Standards Project Officer. From the publication of Les instruments de recherche (Association des Archivistes du Quebec 1984) and Towards descriptive standards (Bureau of Canadian Archivists 1985), work has advanced along several parallel fronts. Archival requirements are being written into CANMARC and a database of accessions has been prepared for the National Archives' Historical Resources Branch using a MARC format on CDS/ISIS software. Detailed work on authority controls, description standards and subject indexing continues. The first Rules of archival description are expected in 1990, substantially reworking the Anglo-American cataloguing rules, which have also been superseded in the United States by Steven Hensen's Archives, personal papers and manuscripts (2nd edition 1989)

United Kingdom: the Manual of archival description

Well before computerisation had had any real effect on archives in the united Kingdom there had been a good deal of serious debate about both archival terminology and subject thesauri. Working parties of the Society of Archivists devised a list of archival data elements (Vyse 1982-3) and also a prototype subject thesaurus (which, however, has not been widely used).

With funding from the British Library Research and Development Department the Society commissioned an Archival Description Project from the University of Liverpool under the supervision of Michael Cook. This surveyed the main computer applications in Britain's archives (Bartle and Cook 1983) and was subsequently extended to an analysis of the levels and details of archival description, which again drew widely on the experience of all kinds of archives throughout the country (Procter 1988).

The first result was a prototype Manual of archival description ('MADI' 'Cook and Grant 1985) which has now been tested and refined in a second edition, passing through the press at the time of this report. It has been warmly received by the profession in the United Kingdom where, however, there is no machinery for its enforcement or adoption as a nationwide standard, although it seems likely to serve in this capacity on an informal basis.

Control of terminology and concepts

Terminology

Control of vocabulary and terminology is the subject of growing professional interest. Where this is partly or mainly a matter of linguistic control lexicons and dictionaries have been published, such as the Lexicon van Nederlanse Archieftermen (The Hague 1983) used by the Netherlands and Indonesia. In Sweden an archive vocabulary is published as a national standard [62 80 10] and in China a Standard was recently published [1989] by the Scientific and Technical Research Institute on Archives. Hungary noted the existence of a national lexicon of archival terms and also an adaptation for Hungarian use of a dictionary of archival terminology used in socialist countries. France has published a vocabulary of archival and diplomatic terms. Work is in progress towards an agreed terminology for the Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries. Italy felt the need for some similar initiative. In Switzerland each originating department has its own vocabulary, or Registraturplan.

Thesauri

The ISO has issued guidelines for the establishment of monolingual (ISO 2788) and multi-lingual (ISO 5964) thesauri, but these appear to have been little used by archivists.

Further attempts have been made at national level to control terminology, in thesauri promulgated by national Standards institutions, by ministerial directions, or by the national archives or learned bodies.

In the USA, for example, the national Standard [Z.39.19-1980] on subject thesauri is informed by ISO 2788. A national thesaurus for information retrieval was issued as a national Standard by the USSR in 1980. The Direction des Archives de France has devised a thesaurus (W) governing the description and indexing of contemporary local administrative archives, for use by the archives of départements, whilst other localities have devised their own thesauri.

Work on thesaurus construction and subject indexing is in progress at national level in a number of other countries including Canada, China, Sweden, and under the impact of computerisation in many individual archives elsewhere.

Debates about the technicalities of subject indexing and the compilation of thesauri had been current throughout the archival world long before the advent of computers, and the present survey cannot enter into all the issues involved. As with archival description more generally, however, computerisation has served to sharpen the debate, and has opened up new practical problems and difficulties, as well as presenting opportunities.

Once again it is useful to remember that the needs of different countries, and of different kinds of archives within one country, may be quite distinct. It can be altogether more feasible for a local or specialist archives or even a national library to create a central subject index from its finding aids for archives and manuscripts, even down to item level, than for a large national archives faced with a vastly greater bulk of material to do the same.

Commonly in the latter kind of institution users still have to be instructed in the principles of provenance and the organisational framework of the record-creating bodies if they are to derive the greatest benefit from their searches. This helps to explain the recent crop of guides to national archives based on organisational histories (see above, p. ll) and also the urgency of the need felt in some countries to establish authority controls relating to the organisation and functions of government as well as to the more obvious fields of personal, place and corporate names.

But it is perhaps over subject headings that most interest is now being expressed. In the USA the Library of Congress Subject Headings file has become a de facto national Standard. This can have drawbacks as well as advantages. The assignment of appropriate subject headings to the reports received for the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, for example, is a factor in NUCMC's considerable backlog of entries for publication. (In the United Kingdom an earlier initiative, in a pre-computer age, to introduce subject cataloguing of a comparable kind into the National Register of Archives was abandoned because of the staff costs involved and the unwieldy growth of the index).

Subject access to data can be greatly facilitated by computerisation and is virtually expected by many software packages, some of which come complete with their own built-in thesauri. With the computer, for relatively little extra effort (keying in a few control words at the moment of description, for example) whole new tracts of information can be opened up. But at the same time some discipline needs to be introduced into the process, otherwise terms may be used inconsistently and not be recognised. by the machine, or for that matter by the user, conducting the search.

Some archives and archivists have traditionally been opposed to the creation of general thesauri, for a variety of reasons including the feeling that every distinct fonds has its own character which should be allowed to dictate the terminology used (ADPA 1/1, 1972). Others argue that concepts and terminology in natural language vary so much even from region to region (Playoust 1988, pp. 115-117), let alone from nation to nation, that observance of any central rules would be misleading.

Partly for this reason the French application for the control of modern records, PRIAM 3, has been built up using natural language, with controls inserted only at a later stage.

By contrast, with some modest variations, archives as far afield as Hungary and Zimbabwe appear to be able to make use of the Library of Congress Subject Headings.

Other countries have their own national authorities, like the Repertoire des vedettes-matieres, Canadian Subject Headings and Canadian Authorities used by the National Archives of Canada.

Authorities used with reference to the names of persons, places and companies are almost always of local or national scope, as in the specific instances reported to the survey from Sweden and the United Kingdom.

There are further complications for highly specialised research centres where the archives may need a detailed command over concepts, or even place-names, required almost nowhere else and which are not covered in sufficient depth in any common authority.

The British Antarctic Survey, to take just one example, needs to identify very specific sites within a defined geographical territory as well as highly specialised scientific terms.

In the United States, the further research has progressed on the fundamentals of archival description, the more options it has been found necessary to create for the description and control of specific media or concepts.

A recent review of the position (Zinkham 1989) described the thesauri and controls already evolved or in progress: for art and architectural, cartographic, graphic and moving image materials, for form terms in general and for genre terms, binding terms, printing and publishing evidence and provenance, emphasising the need for careful analysis by form of material.

It is apparent to the outside observer that the main archival institutions, however much they wish to abide by standards or prescribed authorities, in practice tend to diverge in at least some respects to meet their own needs. One possible solution seems to be a loose federation of authorities where the minimum, and perhaps the only, requirement for the compiler of an archival description will be to give a clear indication which particular conventions etc are being followed.

With the free-text searches now possible on many databases, which are capable of producing word-by-word concordances of their data content, some argue that controlled subject indexing is no longer necessary. This depends largely on the scale of the individual application, but the use of some form of thesaurus-like control can be recommended as a means of taming the material for the searcher and reducing the time taken in searches. The many other forms of controlling searches, including the use of 'stop' and 'pass' or 'go' lists, word linkage, right and left truncation of key-words, and Boolean operators, and specific problems associated with marking up existing finding aids to assist such data control have been described elsewhere (Arad 1981 (2), 1987; Cloulas 1985).

In the particular fields of subject indexing and thesaurus control the current priorities would still seem to be at local and national rather than international level, although there is scope for the wider exchange of ideas and approaches to problems such as authority control. The professional associations of archivists probably have the most important role to play in this respect nationally, but some of the problems are far-reaching and require detailed consideration by specialists, for which public sponsorship and grant aid seem likely to be necessary.

Data exchange formats

Incompatibilities between one manufacturer's hardware and software and another's, and even between different ranges or issues of the same manufacturer's products, have been among the greatest stumbling-blocks to the free exchange of information between computers either by direct telephone or cable links on the one hand or by tape and disk on the other.

The confusing array of national and international standards for electronic data exchange has recently been studied by the National Institute of Standards and Technology on behalf of the united States National Archives. The model known as Open Systems Interconnection has already been adopted as a national Standard by the USA and a number of other countries (Dollar 1990; United Nations 1990), and in this field archivists are joining with documentalists and other information scientists in a number of individual countries and through the International Standards Organisation in an attempt to bring some order out of chaos.

Until manufacturers have been persuaded to adopt industry-wide standards, however, other partial ways around some of the problems are having to be found, including notably a series of exchange formats for bibliographical and archival data which are not system-dependent.

ISO 2709 which governs the exchange of bibliographical information on magnetic tape has influenced the development of a number of national Standards in this field and the MARC family of formats, including USMARC: AMC, were developed in conformity with it (Thacker 1988).

Librarians discovered relatively early that the worst inconveniences of system-dependency could be overcome by setting out the data in a particular format, tagged in such a way that the corresponding entries from differing inputs would be 'recognizable'. The rapid adoption of the MARC format greatly facilitated common cataloguing practices.

The Cartographical and Architectural Archives Division of the National Archives of Canada uses CANMARC for its cataloguing. The British Library, by treating its archives and manuscripts as quasi-book materials, uses UKMARC for the description of its Additional Manuscripts without an AMC format (see p. 19).

USMARC: AMC

The obvious advantages of an agreed format in the library world led archivists in the USA to seek a similar option for archives. Their research, which has been widely publicised, led to the compilation of a dictionary of data elements used in archival description, the evolution of an adaptation of MARC for the control of archives and manuscripts USMARC: AMC its adoption at first experimentally but then definitively by a number of the major research libraries and networks including OCLC and RLIN (see below)' and its adaptation for use with microcomputers.

By the mid 1980s some of the more enthusiastic advocates of USMARC: AMC were challenging sceptics to 'demonstrate an archival requirement that the MARC format cannot accommodate' (Lytle 1984, p.361) and proclaiming that it had 'the potential to change the lives of archivists forever' (Hensen 1986, p.32). It may therefore be appropriate to look in turn at some of the arguments for and against this format.

MARC: AMC has now been so widely tested in the United States that it is becoming in effect a national standard. Experiments with the format have been successful in Canada, and its development in the United Kingdom and Sweden is being actively explored. It has been widely promoted by its advocates. Its adoption by RLIN has facilitated its wide use in the USA throughout government, university and state repositories, with all the advantages associated with networking (see p.49). It has enabled repositories to exchange and cumulate data without machine dependency, and may have advanced the credibility of the archival profession in the eyes of other information professionals particularly librarians.

Unlike its parent MARC formats, AMC is not medium-specific but can be used to describe any kind of archives. It has the facility to cover description across the whole lifecycle of records through its Archives and Records Control (ARC) segment. Its adaptability to microcomputers is proving helpful for small institutions which at present have no network links: software for this purpose has been devised by Michigan State University (MicroMARC: AMC) and commercially as Cactus's MINARET, although there has been some difference of opinion among reviewers as to the usefulness of these applications (Archival Informatics Newsletter 1/3 pp. 46-48; 2/3 p.65).

The AMC format could equally be used in manual cataloguing in repositories which at present have no computer facilities but wish to keep open that option for the longer term. In the computerised, environment for which it was designed, however, it enhances access to the data for all users by offering cross-referencing and cross-searching between fields and between data elements.

The overwhelming impression is that USMARC: AMC is here to stay.

But it has its critics, even in the United States, and it remains to be seen how successfully it could be adopted overseas. For all its virtues it has still a basically bibliographical pedigree that some regard as an unnecessary constraint for archives, including the separation of main, added and subject-added headings, which breaks up the description. It is designed with collection/fords-level descriptions in mind, and although it can be used at lower levels most users continue with separate word processing applications for the production of their inventories below series level. So in this sense MARC: AMC cannot be seen as a complete archival description system in the way that its parent MARC may be a complete library cataloguing system.

MARC: AMC has also been criticised for its complexity compared with traditional archival description practices, and for the number of fields and sub-fields provided, not all of which need be filled in but whose very existence may encourage prolixity in description and too much attention to detail when time is at a premium. This may make it a costly choice, and particularly unsuitable for handling data in the quantities required by very large national or provincial archives. Warnings have also been sounded about other costs, open and hidden, of adopting the format: the initial costs of computerisation staff costs including training in the use of the format, on-costs caused by the need to conform to authorities demanded in a network application of AMC, which might in turn require standardising earlier data and supplying, for the benefit of the computer, data that had been taken as read or felt unnecessary in a manual environment.

Other formats

Other countries may prefer to devise their own formats, to take account of their differing traditions of archival description, and a number including Sweden, Norway and Portugal are already doing so.

In Sweden, the automation of the National Catalogue for Private Archives has provided the incentive for developing a common exchange format. The national archives analysed the existing manual data forms for the Catalogue, compiled over a 20-year period, and devised programs to cater for the elements of description already employed and a number of additional ones. Efforts are now under way to devise a Swedish MARC: AMC format to cover collection-level description with a view to national or international data exchange with other archives and libraries. There remain some substantial areas for research, particularly on authorities and on the means of incorporating the distinctive Swedish classification scheme which prescribes nine main categories of papers for each record-creating entity, each of which may according to the circumstances be further sub-divided. It is intended that the database devised in this way to cover private papers should gradually be developed to cover government and municipal records (Dahlin 1988).

Norway has similarly developed, using the programming language PASCAL, a standard description format that is not machine-dependent, combining a hierarchical database structure with free text retrieval at the levels of the originating institution, series and item, for use in the national and regional archives.

The Portuguese Institute of Archives is working towards the establishment of a national archives network. It has used Unesco's MicroISIS software (with MSDOS operating system) to develop a hierarchical system of archival description closely based on the British Manual of archival description (see p.37). The system, ARQBASE, aims to improve precision and standardisation, throughout Portuguese archives. It was described to ICA's Automation Committee at its meeting in London, November 1989.

ARQBASE provides a different field for each level of archival description, with sub-fields appropriate to each level in accordance with MAD. It allows free text input and selected retrieval at all levels. Information once entered at a higher level is automatically carried forward to lower-level description of the same material. MicroISIS has been found to meet all its needs for online retrieval and to provide suitable printed finding aids for public use.

Concurrently with the later stages of the Archival Description Project (see p.37) Liverpool University has also been studying the ways in which USMARC: AMC might be adapted for the UKMARC environment, and in 1989 issued a draft discussion document for a UKMARC: AMC. The feasibility of such an application cannot be doubted but a great deal of ground remains to be covered before this can be put into practice, with resistance being shown initially by UKMARC's controlling body, and discussions barely yet beginning among archivists, manuscripts librarians and archival institutions about authority controls at national level. More seriously, the major national archival institutions have yet to be persuaded of the need to comply with what are still seen as bibliographical constraints.

The initially different responses of archivists in Canada and the USA to the challenge of computerisation - the one looking at fundamentals of archival description, the other at a data exchange format - are now to some extent converging, though considerable further research and development are required.

There are some interesting parallels between the experiences in these two countries and also in the United Kingdom. Interest was awakened at about the same time, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The professional associations took up the cause but soon proved to have insufficient resources to make the required progress. The initiative passed to small ad hoc working parties or groups of individual archivists, sometimes acting without any formal mandate. Funding in each case had to come from public and private sources, but notably in the USA from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, in Canada from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and in the UK from the British Library Research and Development Department. More recently, strenuous efforts have been made, most successfully in Canada, to enlist the support of the national archives and in the USA to put the ball firmly back in the court of the professional associations. Only with commitment and promotion at this higher level does further real progress now seem likely.

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