michelsd
commented
1 year ago Great idea. Happily, there is already an SAA endorsed standard that can provide guidance: https://www2.archivists.org/groups/standards-committee/guidelines-for-standardized-holdings-counts-and-measures-for-archival-repositories-and-special-colle
Link to relevant DACS principle
Principle 2. Users are the fundamental reason for archival description.
Describe how DACS does not currently meet this principle
DACS allows extend descriptions to be either the space occupied by the materials (e.g. 12 cubic feet) or the number of material types ( e.g. "12 photographs"). DACS also suggests consistency in extent units. In practice many repositories describe extents normalized in terms of the shelf space occupied, such as cubic feet or linear feet.
While this is helpful for collection management purposes, it must be unintuitive for users, as neither cubic feet or linear feet are common units in everyday life. Moreover, this metric often is not helpful to described the extent of the materials, as 1 cubic foot, could either be a records box with a hat in it, or potentially up to 10,000 pages of records. In some cases, descriptions of containers may be helpful, as "10 shoe boxes" may be very helpful for some users, but the inconsistency of "boxes" can also makes container descriptions unhelpful. DACS should provide better guidance on making user-friendly extents
More intuitive extent descriptions may also be unhelpful for collection management purposes. Perhaps it would be helpful to have a human-focus extent description, as well as a normalized extent such as cubic ft. This is already common practice for dates, why not extents? This way, an extent note can be both "3 records boxes measuring 16.25in x 12.5in x 10.5in with 76 file folders" as well as "3 cubic feet."
I expect that this will require a
Link(s) to any relevant part(s) of DACS
2.5 Extent (Required) 2.4 Date (Required)