Give Us Your Thoughts On the Rules for Archival Description (RAD)

November 20, 2015

The Canadian Committee on Archival Description (CCAD) wants to hear from you on the future of the Canadian archival descriptive standard, the Rules for Archival Description (RAD).

CCAD is a committee of the Canadian Council of Archives (CCA) that has overall responsibility for maintaining RAD. CCAD, with support from Library and Archives Canada (LAC), is convening a Meeting of Experts on Archival Description, to be held in Ottawa in February 2016. The Meeting will bring together archival professionals and educators and potentially represents the first step in a long-term process to update and revise RAD. The goal of the Meeting is to arrive at a broad consensus regarding the direction of RAD revision and set in place the planning framework for updating the standard.

RAD has always been a community-based standard and is central to the Canadian Archival System. In order to ensure the success of a potential revision to RAD, input from the broader archival community is essential from the outset and will be throughout the process.

Feeding into the Meeting of Experts, CCAD is seeking community input and has prepared a web survey tool (link below) to solicit feedback on a series of questions relating to RAD and its future. Provincial and territorial councils, professional associations, archival institutions and individual archivists, archival educators and students, users of archives – we want to hear your views.

The surveys can be found here:

• Group Survey
• Individual Survey

For additional background information, please see this PDF document on the
CCA website:

• http://www.cdncouncilarchives.ca/survey/CCADMtgExperts_EN.pdf (English
  version)
• http://www.cdncouncilarchives.ca/survey/CCADMtgExperts_FR.pdf (French
  version)

Respondents should send their feedback by December 18, 2015.

Respondents will be asked to identify themselves and indicate whether they are submitting on behalf of a provincial or territorial council or association, an institution or on their own account as an individual.

If you have given your feedback to a provincial or territorial council or association, or contributed to an institutional response, but would like to also respond to the survey as an individual, please do so.

Thank you.

Richard Dancy
Canadian Committee on Archival Description (CCAD)
radancy@sfu.ca

Christina Nichols
Canadian Council of Archives (CCA)
cnichols@archivescanada.ca

Background

Canadian archivists were pioneers in the development of archival descriptive standards. The 1985 report Towards Descriptive Standards set out 35 recommendations that provided the agenda leading to RAD. Under the leadership of the Bureau of Canadian Archivists (BCA) and with financial support from the Canadian Council of Archives (CCA), working groups were struck, and the first chapters were formally published in 1990. Canadian archivists at that time made the strategic decision to develop the rules within the framework of then-existing bibliographic standards: the International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) and Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2).

International descriptive standards were developed by the International Council on Archives (ICA) in the 1990s with ISAD(G), the General International Standard on Archival Description, and ISAAR(CPF), the International Standard Archival Authority Record (Corporate bodies, Persons, and Families). This work was partly inspired by RAD’s success, and Canadian archivists played a key role in the drafting. Many of the core RAD elements reappear in the international standards, but these documents differ from RAD in significant ways, abandoning the bibliographic framework. In virtually every other archival jurisdiction, the ICA standards now form the starting point.

The bibliographic standards that RAD originally adapted have themselves been superseded within the library community, as librarians recently replaced AACR2 with a new standard, Resource Description and Access (RDA). One the main motivations for this revision was the perceived inadequacies of the AACR2 framework for managing the description of digital materials.

A similar issue confronts Canadian archives. We are increasingly dealing with digital materials (both digitized and born-digital), but RAD’s media chapters are very much rooted in a world of analogue objects.