Meeting #8: Deconstructing Archival Description @ Yale (and Beyond)

 

Wednesday, July 9, 4pm

BRBL Room 39

Discussion leader: Jennifer Meehan

In a joint article entitled “Stories and Names: Archival Description as Narrating Records and Constructing Meanings,” Wendy Duff and Verne Harris offer a deconstructive analysis of the what and why of archival description and draw out the implications of this analysis for endeavors to define descriptive standards.  They end their analysis by making a call for "liberatory" descriptive standards.  Their article will serve as a starting point for a discussion of how archivists at Yale might or might not respond to such a call, and what this might mean for local implementation of descriptive standards (such as DACS, EAD, and eventually EAC) as well as current and future developments in local descriptive tools and systems.

Suggested reading: Wendy Duff and Verne Harris, “Stories and Names: Archival Description as Narrating Records and Constructing Meanings,” Archival Science 2 (2002): 263-285.Duff&Harris.pdf

    Abstract: The authors of this essay, coming from very different traditions and modes of archival discourse, explore together archival description as a field of archival     thinking and practice. Their shared conviction is that records are always in the process of being made, and that the stories of their making are parts of bigger stories     understandable only in the ever-changing broader contexts of society. The exploration begins with an interrogation of the traditional and ever-valid questions of the         what and the why of archival description. Thereafter they offer a deconstruction of these questions and of the answers commonly proffered. In these sections of the     essay their concern is with descriptive architecture, the analysis covering a number of specific architectures and including only oblique references to descriptive         standardization. The concluding section attempts to draw out the implications of their analysis for endeavours - irrespective of the architectures being used - to             define, and to justify, descriptive standards. Their call is not to dispense with standardization, but rather to create space for a liberatory approach which engages         creatively the many dangers of standardization.

Reference material:

   Describing Archives: A Content Standard (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2007)   

    Encoded Archival Description

    Encoded Archival Context

    International Standard for Archival Description (General)

   International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families

    International Standard for Describing Institutions with Archival Holdings ISDIAH Eng_0.pdf