Abstract
During the 1960s Peter J Scott and colleagues at the then Commonwealth Archives Office (now National Archives of Australia) devised a new approach to archival intellectual control, which separated descriptive information about the creators of records from information about the records themselves. This paper provides an overview of the major features of Scott’s system, placing it in its historical context and exploring its impact on the development of international archival descriptive standards.
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Notes
- 1.
The Society of American Archivists online glossary defines ‘record group’ as: a hierarchical division that is sometimes equivalent to provenance, representing all the records of an agency and its subordinate divisions. However, the records of a large agency may be broken into several record groups, treating the records of different divisions as separate collections rather than as a series. http://www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/r/record-group.
- 2.
Source for Fig. 1: ‘Conceptual and Relationship Models: Records in Business and Socio-legal Contexts’, a deliverable from the 1998–1999 Australian Research Council funded Monash University research project, called ‘Recordkeeping Metadata Standards for Managing and Accessing Information Resources in Networked Environments over time for Government. Commerce, Social and Cultural Purposes’, Chief Investigators Sue McKemmish, Ann Pedersen and Steve Stuckey.http://www.sims.monash.edu.au/research/rcrg/research/spirt/deliver/conrelmod.html; model developed by Sue McKemmish, Glenda Acland, Kate Cumming, Barbara Reed, and Nigel Ward. The Australian RKMS was a deliverable from the 1998–1999 Australian Research Council funded Monash University research project, called ‘Recordkeeping Metadata Standards for Managing and Accessing Information Resources in Networked Environments over time for Government. Commerce, Social and Cultural Purposes’, Chief Investigators Sue McKemmish, Ann Pedersen and Steve Stuckey. McKemmish, S., Acland, G., Ward, N., Reed, B.: Describing Records in Context in the Continuum: The Australian Recordkeeping Metadata Schema. Archivaria 48, 3–43 (1999).
- 3.
This work is currently being progressed by the International Council on Archives Expert Group on Archival Description, see http://www.ica.org/en/about-egad
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Cunningham, A. (2016). Describing Archives in Context: Peter J Scott and the Australian ‘Series’ System. In: Lemieux, V. (eds) Building Trust in Information. Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40226-0_2
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