Standard ISDIAH: International Standard for Describing Institutions with Archival Holdings (2008 - )

From
2008
Website
https://www.ica.org/en/isdiah-international-standard-describing-institutions-archival-holdings

Summary

The ISDIAH: International Standard for Describing Institutions with Archival Holdings was developed by the ICA Committee on Best Practices and Standards in London, United Kingdom on 10-11 March 2008. The purpose of the standard was to utilise separate standardised descriptions of holders of archives to make archival information systems more usable (ICA, 2008).

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Details

The Records in Context - Conceptual Model (RiC-CM) aims to supercede the ISDIAH standard, along with the other three core standards ISAD(G), ISDF and ISAAR (CPF) in order to create a unified and more readily useable and explicit standard for archival description:

"ICA standards have been successful in promoting international consistency in descriptive practices. They have facilitated system developments, data sharing, and cooperative integrated access. However, because the four standards were created serially rather than together, the intended complementary interrelation of each with the others is implicit rather than explicit. Many archivists have had difficulty understanding how to use the four standards together to form complete archival description. Further, the emergence of semantic web technologies, in particular conceptual models (or ontologies) and Linked Open Data (LOD), offer many benefits to the archival community to improve archival descriptive practice and to make it more effective to better serve and expand the user community: methods for clarifying and making explicit the concepts and assumptions underlying archival descriptive practice; methods for formally representing archival descriptive data that enables computational use and reuse of the data to provide access to and understanding of archival resources; and methods for sharing archival descriptive data in integrated cultural heritage access systems. The challenges presented by the existing standards and the demonstrated promise of the new technologies led ICA to review its strategies related to the current descriptive standards. Various local and national efforts have seized the initiative in the development of archival conceptual models, and while these initiatives clearly demonstrate a growing awareness of and interest in the benefits offered by the new technologies, to ensure that the next generation of archival descriptive standards reflects international consensus and furthers the consensus building, collaboration, sharing of knowledge and technologies, it is time to learn from and bring these initiatives together" (ICA, 2016, para. 1).

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Winsome Adam

Created: 31 July 2018, Last modified: 1 August 2018