About Standards

Standards are mutually agreed upon statements that help control an action or a product. They may be created to establish consistency within an organization, among a group of organizations or countries, or be implemented globally.  Archivists use standards to bring consistency to the information that they create concerning their collections.
 
Standards represent professional consensus on best practices
The process that produces standards typically brings together knowledgeable practitioners to codify a reasonable body of practice based on a wide range of experiences. It is important that a standard be developed through a consensus-building process  in the community where it is to be used.

Standards enable and foster the interchange of information
There are standards that govern the structure and content of the information that archivists create about their collections, as well as standards that bring consistency to the way in which that information is communicated among institutions.   For example, the ability to widely share archival catalog records requires the acceptance of a common interchange format such as the USMARC Format for Bibliographic Data (USMARC).

Standards provide an insurance policy against technological obsolescence
Archives will transfer descriptive information in electronic form to new computer systems as technology evolves.  Standards facilitate that data migration.

Acceptance of standards is not without cost
Standards seldom represent the leading edge of technology.  Some institutions may wish to be early implementers of new computer applications rather than wait for the standards development process.   There is also a certain loss of local autonomy in adhering to standards, which was a concern, for example, when the USMARC Format for Archives and Manuscript Control (USMARC-AMC)  was introduced.  However, today most archivists agree that the benefits of greatly enhanced access and information exchange have more than offset any negative impact from the adoption of MARC.

Different Types of Information Standards

Data structure standards
Data structure standards define the categories into which information is to be divided; they establish what data elements will be recorded. For example, it might be decided that there will be a category for name information for the corporate body or the individual around whom the collection is organized,  a category for the inclusive dates of the materials in the collection, and a category for the type or format of the materials.

Data value standards
Data value standards govern the terminology that will be employed in the given categories established by the data structure standard. Thesauri, controlled vocabularies, and authority files regularize and standardize the terminology so that  information about like materials will be brought together upon retrieval. A name authority file will indicate which name among a number of spelling variants and pseudonyms should be used in the description.

Data content standards
Data content standards govern the order, syntax, and  form in which the data values are entered. For example, if Paul Joseph Smith is the authorized name in the authority file, the data content standard might specify that the last name be entered  first, as in Smith, Paul Joseph.

Data interchange standards
Archivists also use another type of information standard, the interchange standard, which facilitates the interchange of information by specifying both a data structure and the way in which the individual data values are coded or labeled within that structure. The USMARC Format for Bibliographic Data (USMARC) and the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) are both interchange standards that have these qualities. For example, the MARC format specifies that a field designated 655 be used for data on the physical form or genre of an item or group of items. The data that is entered there is coded according to a carefully defined protocol.