1. intellectual arrangement
Each archival collection will have its intellectual arrangement, that is the arrangement of the material in a hierarchical nature that intends to reflect its original creation or arrangement within a recordkeeping system. Over time additional material may be received and these accessions will be integrated into the collection and the intellectual arrangement will be updated. The arrangement is used to portray and distinguish critical elements of context.
2. descriptive metadata [in-progress]
To facilitate discovery and access to the archival collection archivists like to provide descriptive metadata about the archives. This typically includes an overview of the entire collection with a biographical / historical introduction to place the collection into its wider context (for example about the person, family or organisation), the scope, span dates and format of the material and details of related material held in other collections (within the same archival repository or held elsewhere).
At a lower level within the intellectual arrangement the descriptive metadata will often include title, description, dates, format and extent information. In some cases each distinct physical item will have its own description but this is not always the case for example we might assign a single reference number to a bundle of correspondence and clarify the extent as 1 bundle (52 letters). With born digital material the sheer volume means that there is a high likelihood that a single descriptive entry will be used for a series of related digital assets
Although there are different national cataloguing standards (DACS in North America and ISAD(G) in UK) there is wider commonality in sharing this data using EAD [see below] which clearly identifies possible fields at collection and component levels.
3. technical metadata [todo]
4. EAD [in-progress]
EAD2002 - Library of Congress website http://www.loc.gov/ead/index.html
Schema - http://www.loc.gov/ead/eadschema.html
Tag Library - http://www.loc.gov/ead/tglib/index.html or as PDF
