Hi Archives list colleagues,

Just wanted to jump in here and try to address some of the issues raised in
this thread of listserv posts. To be right up front about my context for
what I have to say below, I was involved for 2 years in the work of the
Canadian-U.S. Taskforce on Archival Description (CUSTARD), out of which DACS
was produced for the U.S. archival community. DACS emerged from a shared
draft standard created by the CUSTARD group, and the Canadian version of
that, RAD2, is still in review (see below). Also, I'm one of the instructors
for the SAA DACS workshop.

DACS & EAD

The question in Evelyn Taylor's original post on this subject doesn't seem
to have gotten addressed. It was a request "... in the simplest terms
possible, [for an] explanation of what DACS is - as compared to EAD - [and]
do they work together or not?"

DACS is a data content standard and EAD is a data structure standard. So if
you think about EAD as defining the buckets, DACS helps you to figure out
what to put in some of those buckets. There's a great explanation of content
standards vs. structure standards in "Descriptive Metadata Guidelines for
RLG Cultural Materials", available at
http://www.rlg.org/en/pdfs/RLG_desc_metadata.pdf - specifically "Chapter 1:
Terminology" on p. 3-5. DACS is only one of many data content standards that
might help you determine what content to supply in which EAD elements. If
you want an overview of the correspondence between DACS element content
rules and EAD tags, you might take a look at the DACS Appendix C, Table C-5
erratum, available on the SAA web site at
http://www.archivists.org/publications/DACS_TableC5_Erratum.pdf. This is a
crosswalk that maps DACS element content rules into specific EAD and MARC
"buckets". As indicated on the erratum, this replaces p. 220-221 in existing
print copies of DACS, and will replace these pages in the next printing of DACS.

DACS as a US Standard

It is kinda fuzzy what makes something a "US standard", but in the archival
community it seems like approval via SAA's standards process is one step,
and having something officially accepted in Library of Congress cataloging
documentation is another. Both of these have happened with DACS. DACS was
approved by SAA Council as an SAA standard in March 2005 on the
recommendation of SAA's Standards Committee, and it has been added to LC's
"MARC Code List for Description Conventions" (see
http://www.loc.gov/marc/relators/reladesc.html). You'll note that APPM is
still on LC's list as well, so even though it is no longer an official SAA
standard (as noted earlier in this thread), it is still possible to use it,
if for some reason you want to, as a description convention for your MARC
cataloging.

DACS & ISAD(G)

ISAD(G) (http://www.ica.org/biblio/isad_g_2e.pdf) is unarguably the
international standard for archival description. It may be worth pointing
out here that ISAD(G) parallels another standard with which many of you may
be familiar: ISBD(G) (the General International Standard Bibiliographic
Description -- http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/pubs/isbdg.htm), which has been
around for a lot longer. A salient point in discussing DACS and APPM is that
ISAD(G) did not even exist when APPM was created. Prior to ISAD(G) becoming
an official standard of the International Council on Archives (ICA) in 1994,
the world for archivists was cast both in the context of and in response to
ISBD(G). So DACS is the first U.S. content standard for archivists that
post-dates and incorporates ISAD(G). ISAD(G) envisions an archival content
standards infrastructure in which the very high-level definitions of
elements used in archival description in ISAD(G) are used in conjunction
with more specific national standards, of which DACS is an example for U.S.
archivists (see I.1 in the ISAD(G) Introduction on p. 7). So DACS
incorporates ISAD(G) with a few well-reasoned tweaks, and I think it is
worth emphasizing that there is no conflict between DACS and the
international:national archival content standards model outlined in ISAD(G).
In case it is useful, I've attached a slide (.wmf file that should open
readily on any Windows machine) that explicitly outlines where DACS differs
from the description elements set forth in ISAD(G). The one ISAD(G) element
(Level of Description) for which DACS does not have a comparable element is
incorporated in DACS via the Chapter 1 "Minimum" requirements, so it isn't
completely missing.

DACS & Other Standards, including RAD

I just wanted to dig a little deeper on a couple statements that Kate Bowers
made. Kate says that RAD (the Canadian Rules for Archival Description) is
much more prescriptive than DACS, which is absolutely true. I think though
that the comparison really needs to be made between DACS and RAD2. I know
that a draft of RAD2, which was the Canadian product based on the work of
the CUSTARD group from 2001-2003, was in circulation for comment by Canadian
archivists last year (for those interested, there's a bit of information on
the progress of RAD2 adoption at
http://www.cdncouncilarchives.ca/archdesreport.html), but I don't know where
it is in the process of being officially adopted as a replacement for RAD by
the CCA. So maybe someone from Canada will weigh in here and update us.
Nonentheless, Kate's observation that the Canadian archival description
standard is more detailed and more prescriptive is true, and will certainly
be true of RAD2 as well.

There are probably a lot of reasons for DACS's lack of prescriptiveness.
Chief among them being the more heavily manuscripts-based U.S. archival
tradition (when compared to the Canadians and much of the rest of the
world), and the lack of gov't funding in the U.S. for a maintenance
infrastructure for archival descriptive standards [in Canada, the meetings
of the Canadian Committee on Archival Description (CCAD) are at least in
part funded by the National Archives and happen 4 times a year, I believe]. 

Kate indicates that the notion in DACS that you can incorporate it with
other standards "makes DACS highly unlike any other standard of its kind."
Kind of, but not unintentionally so. DACS is among the first out of the gate
in a standards revision process that is likely to radically change the basic
infrastructure for descriptive standards (though hopefully not so radically
the end product of description, whether it is archival or bibliographic).
CCO (Cataloging Cultural Objects: http://www.vraweb.org/ccoweb/) also
envisions being incorporatable with other content standards, though I'm no
expert on this particular standard. I did attend a CCO workshop at WebWise
2006 in LA in which Murtha Baca and Elisa Lanzi were very clear that CCO
could supported very flexible implementation in conjunction with other
standards, like DACS. The big sea change, though, will likely be the release
of RDA (Resource Description and Access:
http://www.collectionscanada.ca/jsc/rdaprospectus.html), which will replace
AACR2 sometime in the next year or so. Again, I'm no expert in where this is
going, because I'm not a bibliographic cataloger. But it seems pretty clear
that once RDA is "live", many standards that are based on the AACR2 model
(like Graphic Materials, AMIM, and the IASA Cataloguing Rules) will have to
be rethought in response to whatever direction RDA takes. So I guess I'd
just like to add this as a coda to what Kate says about the relationship of
DACS to other standards: it seems too early to tell, and seeing what happens
with RDA will be a bellweather, I think, about where the content standards
world is going.

Kate also states that DACS "conflicts with just about every other cataloging
standard ... by never instructing one to transcribe a formal title if there
is one." I don't see the conflict. What DACS does clearly state is that
there is nothing archival about transcribing a formal title, and that an
archivist needs to exercise professional judgement about when a formal title
exists and is worth transcribing. The fact of the matter is that the notion
of formal title is a bibliographic construct, and presumes some "chief
source of information" (like a title page) that is created in the course of
the publishing process to capture information about the production of the
work. ISAD(G), on which DACS is based, leaves the choice between providing a
formal title, if it exists, or a supplied title up to the "national
conventions" (see "Rules" under 3.1.2 Title in ISAD(G)). So the fact that
most of the other standards to which Kate refers are based on ISBD(G), and
DACS is, uniquely in the world of U.S. descriptive standards, based on
ISAD(G) means that there isn't a conflict. DACS takes a fundamentally
different approach and doesn't preference any kind of formal title. This
pretty much bears out in RAD2 as well (see the draft of Part I at
http://www.cdncouncilarchives.ca/RAD2-Part%20I%20Description.pdf). If you
look at rule 4.3B32 on p. 14 you'll see that the instruction to prefer a
formal title is qualified by the notion that you're actually describing at a
level at which the notion of a formal title makes sense (e.g., not the fonds
or series, and arguably frequently not the file), that the formal title is
"common to all the materials in the unit being described", and that  it
"accurately and clearly names the unit being described". So in RAD2 the
preference for a formal title is highly qualified by what amounts to the
same thing as the notion of "the archivist's professional judgement" in DACS.

What DACS does say is that if in your professional judgement there is a
meaningful formal title on the unit you're describing that you want to
transcribe, you should use the rules created by the bibliographic community
(currently AACR2, soon to be RDA) to guide your transcription. To me that
doesn't look like a conflict, it looks like a wide open embrace.

My apologies that this got so long-winded, but I hope it helps to untangle
this issue a bit for those who have questions. 

Bill Landis
Metadata Coordinator
California Digital Library
University of California Office of the President
415 20th Street, 4th floor
Oakland, CA  94612-2901
(510) 987-0809
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