n.a resource that defines the elements of a metadata schema, including how they are used and their relationships with other dataHensen 1992, 274As part of its work in building a data dictionary, the Society of American Archivists’ National Information Systems Task Force (NISTF) commissioned a study of descriptive practices across the entire range of repositories having custody of what was very loosely defined as “archival” or “original” material. This study, which was conducted in 1980 by Elaine Engst of Cornell University, clearly demonstrated, to the mild astonishment of the members of the Task Force, that there were indeed broad areas of common descriptive practice among all the institutions . . . More important, however, was the discovery that, horrifying as it might seem to more traditional archivists, these descriptive practices had obvious direct parallels with library descriptive cataloguing. Based on this finding, the Task Force was able to move confidently in adopting (and adapting) the MARC Formats for Bibliographic Description for the purposes of archival description. Thus, the actual process of developing the MARC AMC format became a relatively straightforward one-to-one correspondence of existing MARC bibliographic tags with the NISTF data dictionary.Wallace 1993a, 92Metadata housed within a data dictionary is built up as the database structure/architecture is developed and altered.Wallace 1993a, 94Any archivist can see that if the data dictionary can contain these types of useful metadata, it can also be designed to hold documentation relevant to the archival endeavour, such as appraisal analyses (archival value, retention and disposition schedules), provenance data (name, function, mission), audit trails, distribution lists, version controls, and access restrictions.O’Meara and Stratton 2016, 71Data dictionary: A resource that defines elements and informs use of a metadata standard.Wiedeman 2019a, 395With funding provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the group [NISTF] set to work establishing a standard “data dictionary” for all archival description. This would be “a format for archival information exchange that could be used with all types of hardware and software and could even be adapted for manual applications.” [citation] Setting aside the standardization of finding aids themselves, as well as the intransigence of the profession, the group focused instead on defining the underlying content of archival description and quickly made major advancements.Wiedeman 2019b, 4The OCLC Research Library Partnership Web Archiving Metadata Working Group (WAM) gathered together many leading web archives practitioners and developed a suite of outcomes that included recommendations and a model data dictionary. . . . While the WAM group certainly reviewed and tried to incorporate archival descriptive practices and standards, the recommended data dictionary was a fundamentally bibliographic approach. The report prioritized a single-level set of elements and seemed to envision merely using archival hierarchy to order bibliographic records instead of engaging with archival arrangement and description theory and practice.Joffrion and Cloonan 2020, 51The PREMIS data dictionary further defines core preservation metadata across a number of categories, including administrative (including rights and permission), technical, and structural. The dictionary pays particular attention to the documentation of digital provenance (the history of an object) and to the documentation of relationships, especially relationships among different objects in the preservation repository.
