Summary

The role of record description is a key concept in the archival environment, with comprehensive description being essential for the effective management, preservation and ongoing use and reuse of records (EGAD, 2016).

Details

The Records in Context: A Conceptual Model for Archival Description, Consultation Draft v0.1 (2016) explores this concept, stating that:

"While recorded information created in the context of people's lives and work serves many purposes, one of its essential functions is to serve to extend the limits of human memory, to be an enduring witness of events and activities. As records proliferate, keeping track of them and locating them when needed becomes itself a challenge to human memory. Management of records involves an interrelated combination of physical and intellectual techniques. For analog records, the records are typically stored in a systematic hierarchical manner that reflects the functions, activities, and transactions they facilitate and document, combined with the use of labels and other metadata to facilitate the storing, retrieving, and ongoing use of the records. For digital records, file systems mediate the storage of digital files, most commonly using a hierarchical directory structure that is an analog of the hierarchical storage of physical files, including the use of directory and folder labels and other metadata. In order to establish intellectual control over records and facilitate, locate, identify, retrieve, and use them, however, it is necessary to augment the rudimentary metadata associated with the physical or digital management of records with additional description of contexts…

Preservation of records has multiple facets. For analogue records, this involves storing the records in environments that mitigate physical risks, and ongoing maintenance of records that have suffered damage or are at risk. The challenge becomes much more complex for electronic records, as the carrier, encoding format, mediation device and method must be carefully and persistently managed in order to preserve the records. For both analogue and digital records, the authenticity and integrity of the records must be safeguarded. Such safeguarding, in addition to physically managing the records as such, also involves preserving the context within which the records were created, accumulated, maintained, and used by describing it based on available evidence.

Records emerge not in isolation, but within a context, and within that context, in relation to one another and in relation to the people creating, using, and keeping them. Thus records cannot be understood in isolation from the social-document context within which they emerge. Documenting the context by describing it is essential to the preservation of records. This points to a fundamental tension in archival practice. On the one hand, records are evidence, and maintaining and ensuring the integrity and authenticity of the record as evidence leads to a necessary focus on fixity and maintaining the fixity of the information. On the other hand, records originate and exist over time in dynamic environments, and documenting as fully as possible both the complex origins and ongoing history is essential for both evaluating the evidentiary quality of records, and for understanding them. Comprehensive description as suggested in RIC-CM is essential for the effective preservation of records…

The description created to facilitate management and preservation also serves those interested in records as witnesses to life and work activities, to people, to human-made and natural events, to things made, things studied, things done, and more. Anything and everything may be the subject of records. For people who want to use records as evidence for scholarly, business, personal, or other purposes, description facilitates discovering, locating, identifying, retrieving, evaluating, and understanding them. Such ongoing use and reuse of the records becomes part of the history of the records; it recontextualizes them. The use and reuse generate other records, thereby extending the social-document network" (EGAD, 2016, p. 6-7).

Related entries

Published resources

Reports

• ICA Experts Group on Archival Description, Records in Context: A Conceptual Model for Archival Description, Consultation Draft v0.1 September 2016, International Council on Archives, Paris, September 2016, 116 pp. Also available at https://www.ica.org/en/egad-ric-conceptual-model. Details