Canada’s Mirror Committee for TC 46/SC 11 was well–represented at the ARMA Canada conference, Halifax Nova Scotia in June. Nancy Gover and Sharon Smith presented a session entitled “Library and Archives Canada (LAC) and International Recordkeeping Standards Development”. As the lead of the Standards Council of Canada’s (SCC) Mirror Committee for ISO TC 46/SC 11, LAC has been actively involved in developing international records management standards. In particular, LAC has worked with international counterparts on the revision of ISO 15489. This session looked at how ISO standards can help recordkeepers, while also providing a glimpse into other national and international initiatives underway at LAC.
One of our newest members, Catherine McKinney, presented “A Case Study of a Successful, Defensible Email Solution” which looked at working through technical challenges and ensuring the required governance and processes were in place to produce a successful and defensible long-term email management solution.
In other standards news, the Canadian Committee on Archival Description (CCAD) of the Canadian Council of Archives (CCA) has begun taking steps to determine the future of the Rules for Archival Description (RAD), the Canadian national archival descriptive standard.
A meeting on the future of RAD was convened in February 2016 in Ottawa, at which participants discussed questions concerning the standard that had previously been circulated in survey form to the Canadian archival community. Taking the survey results into account, the goal of this meeting was to achieve consensus on the issues and identify next steps.
CCAD prepared a report from this meeting, which contained 20 recommendations including that a Canadian national descriptive standard should be maintained, and that it should align more closely with the international archival descriptive standards of the International Council on Archives (ICA).
CCAD is now preparing a project work plan to outline how these recommendations could be addressed.
http://www.archivescanada.ca/CWG_CCAD
And, the National Archival Accession Standard Working Group (NAASWG) of the Canadian Council of Archives (CCA) is drafting a set of information elements to support the accessioning of materials into an archival repository.
This standard is the first of its kind in the Canadian context. It is envisioned to support greater consistency in documenting the accessioning process, including links to descriptive records created with the Rules for Archival Description (RAD) during subsequent arrangement and description activities.
A draft list of elements has been created, informed by underlying conceptual analysis and modeling efforts. This draft was recently presented at the Association of Canadian Archivists' conference in Montreal in June 2016. The group is continuing its work and hopes to produce a working draft for community review by late December 2016.