Poor examples in 3.2 System of Arrangement note

[Gregory Wiedeman]

Link to relevant DACS principle

Principle 4. Records, agents, activities, and the relationships between them are the four fundamental concepts that constitute archival description.

Principle 4 describes how:
"The relationships among records, agents, and activities are essential to understanding archives and must be described."

Principle 5. Archival description must be clear about what archivists know, what they don’t know, and how they know it.

Principle 6. Archivists must document and make discoverable the actions they take on records.

Describe how DACS does not currently meet this principle

The examples listed in 3.2.3 merely list the collections series and subseries. This seems more like a table of contents than effective description and is perhaps a holdover from document-based description where navigation was needed. Now our access systems might help users navigate archival collections. Is the purpose of the arrangement note just navigation? If so, should this note be so prominent in DACS and so often used in current practice? https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.76.2.x4h78gx76780q072

Perhaps merely maintaining the arrangement of a collection's description is sufficient to constitute an arrangement note. Thus, EAD could potentially not need an <arrangement> tag as the <c> or <c01> tags would suffice. If so, DACS should be clear about that.

Longstanding archival practice uses arrangement to convey meaning to users though the maintenance of original order. We shouldn't assume all users are understanding this meaning and instead make these relationships explicit in our description. An effective arrangement note should describe how the arrangement of the collection is or is not meaningful, right? These examples are not helpful in that way.

Additionally, while 3.2.1 explicitly excludes "maintenance/reconstitution of original order" that information is really important and often not described sufficiently. This information needs to be required more explicitly by DACS, preferably by a more prominent processing note, but the relationship with the arrangement note should be clarified.

I expect that this will require a

• Minor change to DACS
• Major change to DACS

(changing examples would be a minor change, adjusting how 3.2 relates to 7.1.8 would be a major change)

Link(s) to any relevant part(s) of DACS

7.1.8 Processing Information