Studies On Archival Description Standard In Network Environment

Archival Description is a process that the archivist analysis, choice and record the contents and the form characteristics of the archives while they draw up the archival catalogues, in the archival finding system, the description is to prepare the data for the system, its quality is the key of the finding system development and that the archivist work for the customer. An excellent work of the archival description benefit to strengthen the management of the file work,enhance the practicability and scientific, and advance the communication of the file sections. In the traditional definition of the archival description, the description always contact with the development of the finding aids, Because the environment of traditional archival description is the handicraft one, and in the environment, each process of the work is independent, and there is an explicit boundary between processes, so this work is the key process between the identification and the use , So we can see the traditional archival description is the work of the development of the finding aids on the certain sense. In the modern definition of the archival description, People become some common understanding: In the process, the modern archival description emphasize a dynamic process; On the result, the modern archival description not face an index; in the scope, not only the modern archival description is limited the archival, but also it is expanded to the context that produce and use the archival and the information that produce the information system( or the file system). There is remarkable differentiation between the modern definition of the archival description and the traditional definition of the archival description to archival description on the depth, the scope and the property of the description. Archival Description is the basic and implemental work that manage and develop archival information, the description standard is relate to the prevalence of the finding aids, this seems to be especially importance under the network environment, as a result there is a necessity to integrate the traditional archival descriptions. The archivist organize a special work group for this on the United States and Canada, they research some basic principles that should be followed under the network environment, so that they can provide some widespread standard for the government file, the personal document and the manuscript, and provide a series standard for the electronic archival description of international archivist, in order to provide theory foundations and performance standard for archival information management under the network environment. Since 1980's, The archivist are convinced that a uniform archival description standard can avoid the repetition work among file sections and provide the consubstantial finding aids. Not only such, the conjunction that distribution extensively of the computer make possible of the cheap and fastly delivery of the archives. So it is very important to draw up a standard in the world. More than 20 years ago, the United States commenced the standard of the archival description, The USMARC-AMC that the Library of Congress developed ever ended the independence situation on archival description, But the MARC-AMC wasn't satisfied with us in practices. Because it originated the automation of the library after all, there were some limitations when it was applied with archival description in large archives, And in recent years, with the widespread of the Internet and Web, the file section hope earnestly can provide the information traditional way can't provide, hope earnestly to provide the finding aids on the net. Under this kind of demanding, a kind of newly archivaldescription standard EAD is produced. The purpose of EAD is to alleviate the conflict between the dispersion of archival information and the agreement that customers use the archival information, it is a network description standard to index archival information on line, We choice the SGML as the language to code EAD, and the structures and the contents of the EAD are expressed with the SGML DTD( the document type definition). The purpose of the EAD work group is to provide the interrelated EAD item combination and right label layers for different archives. The EAD DTD is the core contents, The EAD item aggregation is defined to some layers by the EAD DTD. the high item of the EAD DTD mainly includes three contents, namely EAD head mark< eadheader>, front item< frontmatter>, archival description< archdes>, each high item is divided some smaller sub-items again, some sub-items are divided some data items again, the whole item aggregation are included in < ead>...