About

Welcome to the Community Rules for Archival Description (RAD)! This website was created by Grace Phippard in 2026 as part of a project at the University of British Columbia. The primary objectives of this project are :

1. To make RAD more accessible, easier to navigate, and easier to reference for anyone working with archives;
2. To facilitative discourse about arrangement and descriptive practice;
3. To generate suggestions for the revision of RAD through openly accessible and transparent discussions

The Rules for Archival Description

The Rules for Archival Description (RAD) is the primary standard for archival description in Canada. The Canadian Council of Archives (CCA) first published RAD in 1990 and revised it in 2008. You can read more about RAD in the introductions to these editions.

Members of a 2024 Standards Committee in the CCA (Greg Bak, Creighton Barrett, Jennifer Douglas, Krista Jamieson, and Karen Suurtamm) published an article in 2025 reflecting on their experiences on the committee. In this article, the authors raised concerns about the lack of support from the CCA in maintaining and revising RAD. The article included the following call to action, which this project attempts to support:

As the Canadian archival community continues to work toward revising or replacing RAD, we believe there are several points to be acknowledged. Before any work begins on revising RAD, drafting a new standard, or adapting an existing standard, clear guiding principles and criteria for assessment must be developed. Canadian archivists need to articulate what a descriptive standard is to do. This requires open conversation among archivists, archival educators, and other scholars to revisit the purpose of descriptive standards, compare models for descriptive standards, and discuss the need (or not) for a distinctly national standard in Canada. We need to explore issues related to colonialism, reparative description, expanded provenance, structured and linked data, user expectations, and many other topics. This process needs to be accountable to the communities archives serve; archival communities deserve to be engaged in consultations, and archivy needs to conduct robust research into the needs of archival users.¹

GitHub

GitHub is a free and open source online platform that was originally created by the tech community to work on collaborative projects. GitHub uses Git (a version control system) to track changes to projects in detail—including the changes made, the person(s) responsible for those changes, and the reason for those changes.

GitHub is now used outside of the tech community because it is free and offers robust tracking features. The Society of American Archivists (SAA) began using GitHub to host and revise their description standard, Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS) in 2016.

You can read more about GitHub here and read their privacy statement here.

The GitHub repository for this project is publicly accessible online. More information about GitHub and a potential framework for revisions to RAD through this site will be added soon.