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Describing Archives in Context: A Guide to Australasian Practice
The series system is a method of describing records and their contexts of creation and management over time. It has been used for almost forty years. During this period it has been implemented in the majority of Australian government archival organisations and has been adopted by a number of other organisations to serve a range of recordkeeping objectives. It has also been implemented in many international archival institutions.
The key feature of the series system, and that which distinguishes it from other methods of descriptive control, is its separation of record and contextural description. In practice this means that records, the persons or norganisations that create and manage them, and/or the business they document, are each individually registered as separate descriptive entities. Each of these individual descriptions is then linked to enable a full and informative representation of records, their context, and their administration through time.
This guide explains the workings of the series system and recommends its implementation in order to:
- enable full and accurate description of records in archival environments
- increase standardisation of descriptive practice across Australia, and
- facilitate the sharing of archival data.
The book contains examples from both large and small archives, and crosswalks to the international standards ISAD(G) and ISAAR(CPF).
