A Guide to Archival Standards

A brief guide to the various standards applicable to archives and archivists - from our regular column published in ARC magazine. 

The sheer number of metadata standards in the cultural heritage sector is overwhelming, and their inter-relationships further complicate the situation. A useful new resource, Seeing Standards: A Visualization of the Metadata Universe, has been developed by Jenn Riley, Metadata Librarian in the Indiana University Digital Library Program, to assist with the selection and implementation of metadata standards.

Archival Metadata Structure Standards

• International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families (ISAAR(CPF))
• General International Standard Archival Description (ISAD(G))
• International Standard for Describing Functions (ISDF)
• International Standard for Describing Institutions with Archival Holdings (ISDIAH)
• Manual of Archival Description
• Rules for Archival Description (RAD)
• Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS)

Metadata Structure Standards

• Dublin Core (ISO 15836)
• E-Government Metadata Standard (e-GMS)
• Information & Documentation - Records Management Processes - Metadata for Records (ISO 23081)
• ANSI/NISO Z39.87 Data Dictionary - Technical Metadata for Digital Still Images (NISO MIX)
• Spectrum: The UK Museum Documentation Standard
• Visual Resource Association Core (VRA Core)

Metadata Content Standards

• Resource Description and Access (RDA)
• Descriptive Cataloguing of Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance and Early Modern Manuscripts (AMREMM)
• Dublin Core Metadata Initiatives Vocabularies (DCMI) 
• ISO 8601: Data elements and interchange formats - Information interchange - Representation of dates and times
• ISO Representation Codes (ISO 639; ISO 3166; ISO 15924)
• National Council on Archives Rules for the Construction of Personal, Place and Corporate Names (NCA Rules)
• MARC 21 Format for Bibliographical Data

Metadata Packaging Standards

• IEEE Learning Object Metadata (IEEE-LOM)
• Metadata Encoding Transmission Standard (METS)
• Multimedia framework (MPEG-21) (ISO/IEC 21000)

Indexing Standards

• Guidelines for the establishment and development of monolingual thesauri (ISO 2788)
• Guidelines for the establishment and development of multilingual thesauri (ISO 5964)

Thesaurii and word lists

• Australian Governments' Interactive Functions Thesaurus (AGIFT)
• Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary (IPSV)
• Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)
• Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)
• UNESCO thesaurus
• UKAT (UK Archival Thesaurus)

XML DTD and Schema

• Encoded Archival Description (EAD)
• Encoded Archival Context - Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families (EAC-CPF)
• Encoded Archival Guide (EAG)
• Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS)
• Resource Description Framework (RDF)
• Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)

Interoperability Protocols

• The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH)
• Search/Retrieve via URL (SRU)
• Z39.50 Information and Documentation - Information Retrieval - Application Service Definition and Protocol Specification (ISO 23950)

Digital Preservation

• Long-term preservation of electronic document-based information (ISO/TR 18492)
• PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata, Version 2.0 (PREMIS)

Reference Models and Frameworks

• Information & Documentation - Records Management (ISO 15489)
• Open Archival System Model - OAIS (ISO 14721)
• Producer-Archive Interface - Methodology Abstract Standard - PAIMAS (ISO 20652)
• Code of Practice for Cultural Collections Management (BSI PAS 197)

File Formats

• Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
• JPEG 2000 (ISO/IEC 15444)
• Portable Document Format/Archive - PDF/A-1 (ISO 19005-1)
• Tagged Image File Format (TIFF)
• Extensible Markup Language (XML)
• Open Document Format for office applications (OpenDocument or ODF) (ISO/IEC 26300)

Identifiers

• Archival Resource Key (ARK)
• ANSI/NISO Z39.84 Syntax for the Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
• The Handle System
• ISO 9834-8 UUIDs
• PURLs

Security Standards

• Information technology - Security techniques - Information security management systems - Requirements (BS ISO/IEC 27001:2005)
• Information technology - Security techniques - Code of Practice for Information Security Management (ISO/IEC 27002:2005)

Last Updated (Sunday, 29 July 2012 14:45) Wednesday, 23 March 2011 13:48