Appendix A - Society of American Archivists

Manuscripts and ArchivesYale University Libraryhttp://www.library.yale.edu/mssabill.landis@yale.eduDACS revision comments – Bill LandisGenerally, I think these edits represent a real improvement in the structure of DACS. I especiallylike slicing off Part III and freeing this archival content standard from its legacy of inclusion ofselected rules from AACR2 for formulating names. Congrats on moving that forward.I also think that you've done a nice job turning Part II into a data content standard for archivalauthority file records based on ISAAR(CPF) and aimed at encoding in EAC-CPF. Starting to bringthese international content standards (ISAD & ISAAR) together for the benefit of archivists in theU.S. through DACS seems like a major step in the right direction.I've made a lot of comments on the attached PDF of the draft that you released for comments. Theyrepresent my thoughts as I moved through the pages (and pages and pages …) of the revision. Idon't know how useful they'll be to TS-DACS. I'm going to try to summarize the major thrust of mycomments below.1. General:1.1. Preamble partsYou may be waiting until you're farther along with this draft, but I hope TS-DACS will be updating thePreface, Acknowledgments, and Overview of Archival Description to make them specific to DACS 2013. Ithink it is important that you provide some grounding for why these changes were undertaken andaddress the scope of the revision as TS-DACS undertook it, especially at a broad level the things youchose not to address in this revision.1.2. Encoding examples at the end of each chapter in Part I.I think it is a mistake to remove these. I know that you're moving fully encoded examples to theStandards Portal, which is a great thing. Nonetheless, removing element-specific examples ofencoding in EAD and USMARC here forces people who don't really know those structure standardsto wade through fully encoded examples elsewhere. I think element-specific examples serve auseful purpose at the end of each Part I chapter and that they should be updated and retained.1.3. Examples in Chapter 2.3.Many of the new examples in Chapter 2.3 seem gratuitous to me. I actually think you've managed tomake this chapter a laughing stock, frankly. The new examples do things that differ markedly fromother examples without explanation. For example: 2.3.4, where existing examples include all segments of the supplied title, but the new onesdo not, with no explanation about the difference. I think you perhaps underestimate the roleof DACS in teaching. If you want the 2.3.4 examples to illustrate only the name segment,then you need to change all of them, I think. 2.3.6. It seems unuseful to identify the source of an example unless it helps to explainsomething about the example. In both of these examples that is not the case. Again, seemsgratuitous and definitely introduces an inconsistency within examples in the chapter. 2.3.8. Rule is explicitly about personal names, so why would you use an example with acorporate name? And what does "additional records" mean? Additional to what? This is aAction: DACS Revision Page 154 of 158 0113-II-A-DACS