Advanced Archival Access

7703

Seminar in Advanced Archival Access

Catalog Description
        History of archival arrangement and description, in-depth investigation into the issues arising around access to archival materials in the digital world.

Course Objectives
        By the end of the course, the student will be able to

        Interpret the historical progression of attitudes and methods in archival arrangement and description.
        Compare a variety of arrangement and description elements and systems and their appropriateness to a variety of archival settings.
        Design an integrated access system for an archives

Topics Covered
        Historical context for archival description
        Overview of user behavior in seeking information
        Electronic documents compared to physical documents
        Current North American and European perspective on archival description
        Australian perspective on archival description
        Inadequacies of current systems
        Use of metadata in archival description
        Use of markup and ontologies in archival description
        The semantic web, RDF, and topic maps
        Archival functional analysis and Web 2.0
        The role of the human/computer interface in archival description