Thirty Years On: SAA and Descriptive Standards (Session 706)

The speakers consider SAA's role in creating and maintaining descriptive standards for U.S. archivists during the past thirty years. Among their topics: the development of descriptive standards in the United States, with a particular focus on SAA's past and potential roles; early efforts to adapt bibliographic standards for use with archival materials; the emergence of a truly archival international framework for description and the U.S. response; and the promising future of archival metadata standards that better support discovery, sharing, and reuse of descriptive information by users and archivists in responsive, network-accessible tools.