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 [log in to unmask] A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List sponsored by the Society of American Archivists, www.archivists.org. For the terms of participation, please refer to http://www.archivists.org/listservs/arch_listserv_terms.asp. To subscribe or unsubscribe, send e-mail to [log in to unmask] In body of message: SUB ARCHIVES firstname lastname *or*: UNSUB ARCHIVES To post a message, send e-mail to [log in to unmask] Or to do *anything* (and enjoy doing it!), use the web interface at http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/archives.html Problems? Send e-mail to Robert F Schmidt <[log in to unmask]>