INFRASTRUCTURAL STANDARDS
When the archives unit at Liverpool was well established, we looked for a field in which we could make a research contribution. The developments mentioned above suggested that the most likely area would be the development of technical infrastructural standards for professional work, and this has proved a useful choice. The Archival Description Project, funded by the British Library Research and Development Department for a number of years at the end of the 1980s resulted in the publication of two successive versions of MAD. Our intention was to develop a document that would be recognised in the archival profession, in the UK, as a cataloguing standard, similar in status and operation to the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR) in library work.
This aim and MAD's development should be seen in an international context, where it was clear that the leading nations or cultural groups were, during the later 1980s, actively doing the same thing. The American archival cataloguing rules, APPM, were published in successive editions 1983-89, and were formally adopted by the Society of American Archivists. Canadian colleagues began work very systematically by publishing a programme of work and laying down the requirements for the control of archival description, then using this as the framework for the development (still not complete) of their elaborate Rules for Archival Description. Australian archivists began work on their Common Practice Manual at the same period. Similar developments could be observed in Italy and Spain (and no doubt other countries), and the whole enterprise was brought together by the International Council on Archives. The publication and formal adoption of the General International Standard Archival Description (ISAD(G)) in 1993 has provided the profession with a solid, agreed framework for all future work in this area.
The work on this in Britain has since flagged somewhat. In the first place, it is now clear that MAD2 does not effectively supply the need for a formal description standard. A third, more complete, edition is now needed, which will incorporate the ISAD(G) standard, and which will greatly extend the scope and detail of the rules. MAD2 for example, does lay out a framework for archival finding aids which clearly recognises the international levels of archival description, and does also provide appropriate areas and fields into which descriptive elements can be fitted. It gives models for the output from descriptive systems appropriate to these levels. However, it does not include anything that corresponds to the detailed rules for the presentation of data content available in AACR2R. Therefore, MAD2's main use at present is as a general outline or basis, very useful in training, from which further work can be developed.
The profession in the UK has, of course, taken up the challenge of developing authority controls, which is an associated part of the same broad drive towards descriptive standardisation, but otherwise the sharp cut in resources that appeared in the early 1990s has prevented further work on cataloguing standards. This is now an urgent need.
Another thing that is needed is a way of disseminating information and training on these matters, and of formally adopting and maintaining the various standards. In America and Canada, where there is official support and funding, and a sympathetic approach by relevant public bodies, this has not proved to be a difficulty. In Britain, where there is no formal national structure for archives services, and no concerted leadership from any centre, it has proved a major difficulty. The Society of Archivists in 1989, and the National Council on Archives since have both avoided the issue.
In part this is no doubt due to the now clearly perceived inadequacies of our first attempts at description rules; but an important reason is simply that there is not yet a place in our professional culture for the establishment of rules and standards. Though they have in practice followed quite a strongly-defined tradition in their work, British archivists have always asserted their right to develop their own systems.
The working of this tradition is most clear in the history of archival automation in the UK. Three successive attempts at designing a standard computer system for British archivists have been made. The first two have failed for lack of support, the third is at present in doubt; and meanwhile individual archive services continue to design their own from scratch.
All this is going on in the shadow of the other great development of the mid-1990s, the Internet and its offshoots. Itself essentially anarchic, the Internet has prompted some to argue that there will be no further need for technical standards. Most of the (substantial) British contributions to archival information on the Internet, including material made public through earlier channels, has not been formatted in accordance with any standard external to the service that has published the material. Now that we can all get access to the World Wide Web, with only a very simple introduction to the basic standard used by it, HTML, surely there will be no further need for standards and formats that are highly structured and formalised, and depend for their application on the use of specialist software. There may be a continuing need for authority controls (this is probably agreed) because they help users to formulate successful search strategies. But it is questionable, perhaps, whether we need applications such as MARC, etc. Behind this question lies another, more fundamental, one: is there any need for archivists to collaborate with the systems developed by the other information professions?
A theme that has only been mentioned passingly in this paper is that of the user. During all this time, the burden of user services has increased, until now, in many services, it has to be given the major weighting. We are beginning to see some systematic analytical studies of the users of archives services, but in reality most users are too small a group (even now) and too closely linked with the archivists to be treated successfully as the target of a scientific analysis. To a great extent we already know the answers; not that this absolves us from undertaking the analytical work.
However, it is now becoming plain that access to the Internet is bringing in a new, very widely-scattered user group. It is also clear, even in these early days, that there will be radical reassessments of the shape and purpose of published finding aids. It has taken only months of access, by a minority of archivists, to outline a set of guidelines for the Web. In these, many cherished practices will be dropped - lengthy provenance notes, technical language, lists in which the sorting key is an undecodeable reference - even long pages. Hypertext links may be used not only to lead readers to linked documents but also to allow rapid scanning.
These developments signal a quite new relationship with the users, which is certain to affect the shape even of in-house finding aids, and hence to change the process of sorting and listing. The new style will be much more open to the lay person's understanding, and at a distance too. Since we will be directly open to the criticisms not only of Web browsers but also to our colleagues and peers, who will have easy and normal access to our material, we will be much more aware of what is standard, even if we do not explicitly follow a formal standard. This will be the end of a process I saw developing in my days in Devon.
An important change to the general structure of archives service in the UK, observable from the end of 1994, is that we are now much more likely to have a good academic base with which these and other professional questions can be developed. Five years ago we had no full-time academic posts to support professional work; we now have three strongly-developing academic departments, and a large increase in the output of university-based archive services. At the time of writing there is no certainty that these new bodies will be able to survive in the long term; that is perhaps a matter for the professional bodies to take up with government and the funding agencies.
(Cook M. Changing Times, Changing Aims)