RAD2 Backgrounder: 1.0 Introduction

The Rules for Archival Description (RAD) is one of the great accomplishments of the Canadian archival community. Since its publication in 1990, it has been widely used all over Canada¹.New chapters were added throughout the 1990’s, like the ones on graphic materials and sound recordings. RAD can now be considered a complete standard with the inclusion of a more detailed chapter on records in electronic form, two new chapters on objects and philatelic records, and also an index. In this context, it is time to look towards the future: a new edition of RAD.

The idea of a second edition of RAD is not new. In 1998, the Canadian Committee on Archival Description (CCAD) proposed a round table to address the future of our descriptive standard. This project was superseded by an invitation from our American colleagues to share with them our experience and knowledge of the establishment of rules of description and also to assist them with a grant proposal to make Archives, Personal Papers and Manuscripts (APPM)² compatible with Encoded Archival Description (EAD)³. The American archivists, with CCAD members included, submitted a grant proposal with a new objective: reconcile the two North American standards (APPM and RAD) with the international standards (General International Standard Archival Description (ISAD(G)) and International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families (ISAAR(CPF))).⁴ Funding was obtained and the first meeting of the Canada-U.S. Task Force on Archival Description (CUSTARD) was held in Toronto in July 2001.⁵

The CUSTARD group first agreed to a statement of principles guiding the standard development. This was shared with the Canadian community in early 2002. CUSTARD met four times in two years, most recently in Toronto in April 2003. A preliminary version of the new standard, entitled Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DA:CS) and edited by project manager Jean Dryden, was completed in January 2003. After its revision by members of CUSTARD and two external reviewers, divergences appeared and discussions were held until July 2003 to try to resolve matters. At this point, CCAD acknowledged that CUSTARD had done a lot of good work since the beginning of the project, that U.S. and Canadian archivists are closer now than we were two years ago on the description of archives, and that the draft of DA:CS did not meet the needs of U.S. archivists. CCAD members unanimously agreed that we should use the final draft of DA:CS (with some changes) as the basis for a comprehensive revision of RAD that could lead us to RAD2, a detailed, multimedia, multilevel archival descriptive standard with greater structural and substantive compatibility with ISAD(G) and ISAAR(CPF).

CCAD is still interested in working bilaterally with American colleagues, engaging in future dialogue on the development of the U.S. standard and the renewal of RAD in Canada.