ArchivesSpace Metadata Standards Adoption and Maintenance Principles

The Metadata Standards subteam of the ArchivesSpace Technical Advisory Council has adopted these principles to help guide and elucidate our decisions around the adoption and maintenance of external metadata standards, models, and guidelines in ArchivesSpace (including impacts on import, export, and data modeling within the application). We use these principles to assess a diverse landscape of standards: 

• different types of standards (content, descriptive, structural, encoding)

• standards with varying scales of user communities

• new versions of existing standards as well as entirely new standards

As such, these principles are not a checklist but guidelines that allow for a flexible gradient of adoption levels–from fully integrated support to minimal import or export functionality. To assess metadata standards against these principles, we seek input from metadata experts and members of the ArchivesSpace community.

1. The external standard allows a broad constituency of users to better discover, access, and comprehend archival collections.

2. The external standard assists a broad constituency of archivists in processing and maintaining archival collections, enabling them to make more materials available to users.

3. The external standard addresses maintenance burden, supports technologists in better maintaining our systems now and in the future, and does not represent undue added complexity.

4. The external standard enables more effective, reliable, and robust connections with other systems or tools.

5. The external standard responds to the documented needs and use cases of a variety of archival institutions, communities, and contexts.

6. The external standard has been developed and iterated with meaningful input and feedback from a broad constituency of information workers.

7. The external standard allows for flexibility and local customization while also specifying an implementation profile required for minimal compliance and interoperability. 

8. The external standard’s documentation provides clear, unambiguous, and non-contradictory implementation guidelines and practical, real-world examples. 

9. When we provide mappings to external standards developed primarily for uses other than aggregate archival description, it is possible to achieve adequate compliance with the standard without including extraneous, non-archival description.

10. The benefits of adopting the external standard justify the resources required for and outweigh any risks and costs associated with its adoption.