At 10:04 AM 6/22/2006 -0500, Leon Miller wrote:
>  DACS practices that conflict with archival practices outside the US?

Read RAD (Rules for Archival Description, Canada 
http://www.cdncouncilarchives.ca/archdesrules.html).  Conceptually, the 
documents are very, very different.  RAD is much more prescriptive and 
gives rules for a variety of scenarios.  DACS is generally 
non-prescriptive, non-proscriptive and does not go much into specifics for 
formats or other cases where rules might vary.  If you read the preface of 
DACS, it says that within a DACS description you can use other standards, 
including local policies (forgive me for not citing the page).  This idea 
of incorporation without specifics makes DACS highly unlike any other 
standard of its kind.

If you do not incorporate some other standard within a DACS description, if 
you take the DACS rules literally, then DACS conflicts with just about 
every other cataloging standard, including those used within the US, by 
never instructing one to transcribe a formal title if there is one.  This 
is in conflict with RAD (mentioned above), MAD (Manual of Archival 
Description, Great Britain), CCO (Cataloging Cultural Objects), AMIM 
(Archival Moving Image Material : a cataloging manual), and AACR2.

Kate


Kate Bowers
Collection Services Archivist
Harvard University Archives
Cambridge, MA 02138
voice:  (617) 495-2461
fax:    (617) 495-8011
email:  [log in to unmask] 

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