Standards Portal
SAA's Standards Portal is designed to educate the archives community about the value and role of standards, enhance the application of standards to practice, and facilitate successful partnerships with related information standards organizations with mutual concerns and interests. The portal includes SAA-approved standards, guidelines, and best practice documents. The Society's long-term goal is to establish a comprehensive clearinghouse that includes contextual information to assist archivists and allied professionals in moving these, and other external standards, from theory into practice.
Administration and Management
- Provides guidance on site evaluation and construction of archival facilities that meet the needs of staff and researchers to ensure the preservation of archival collections.
- Developed as archives-specific tools to assist "persons with physical impairments in the archives and records management profession (archivists, records managers, and researchers/patrons)" in overcoming challenges working in archives. Recommendations are limited to mobility, sight, and hearing impairments.
- Discusses the definition of college and university archives, as well as the administrative relationships, records management, core archival functions, facilities and equipment, and supporting services involved.
- Provides an objective and consistent framework against which archives can measure their development, recognizing the diversity of both archival institutions and archival media.
- Assists all types of museums—both independent museums and those contained within larger institutions—in the development and administration of archives programs. The document outlines the components of a successful museum archives program.
Arrangement and Description
- An output-neutral set of rules for describing archives, personal papers, and manuscript collections that can be applied to all material types, DACS represents the U.S. implementation of international standards (i.e., ISAD[G] and ISAAR[CPF]) for the description of archival materials and their creators.
- Maintained by SAA in partnership with the Berlin State Library, the EAC-CPF Schema is a standard for encoding contextual information about persons, corporate bodies, and families related to archival materials using Extensible Markup Language (XML).
- Encoded Archival Description is a non-proprietary standard for the encoding of finding aids for use in a networked (online) environment.
Digitization
Education
- The Guidelines for a Graduate Program in Archival Studies serve as a benchmark against which graduate programs in archival studies may be measured. These guidelines establish minimum standards for archival education programs in terms of mission, curriculum, faculty, and infrastructure.
- The purpose of these guidelines, developed for individuals and organizations that provide or sponsor archival continuing education, is to encourage the creation of opportunities for lifelong learning within the archival community.
Ethics, Values, and Legal Affairs
- Describes what professional archivists consider to be best practices regarding reasonable efforts to identify and locate rights holders. "Orphan works" is a term used to describe the situation in which the owner of a copyrighted work cannot be identified and located by someone who wishes to make use of the work in a manner that requires permission of the copyright owner.
- Browse External Ethics, Values, and Legal Affairs Standards
Reference and Access
- Outlines the responsibilities for researcher access, as well as legal and institutional obligations, of a repository in preserving collections for use.
- Developed as archives-specific tools to assist "persons with physical impairments in the archives and records management profession (archivists, records managers, and researchers/patrons)" overcome challenges working in archives. Recommendations are limited to mobility, sight, and hearing impairments.
