n.the management and oversight of actions taken on records in a repositoryWeinberg 1986, 19The record has two sections. The first section represents the process control and the second section represents the action performance.NARA 1986, 23In addition to the descriptive information, process control data elements include the unit of archival control and the unit(s) of physical custody as well as the type of actions taken (such as accretion to an existing body of records, or the creation of a new record group) and the related NN concurrences for each action.Holmes, Hedlin, and Weir 1986, 308–309The project team concluded that RLIN could support many NARA descriptive needs, but not NARA’s needs for process control. Even if RLIN moved toward distributed processing (which is likely), the transmission and transaction costs associated with large volumes of data and the high percentage of administrative information of no interest outside the National Archives are strong arguments against adopting RLIN as the primary automation system supporting NARA process control functions.Reynolds 1987, 267In addition to descriptive screens, the system includes process control and action screens, which provide useful tools for recording donor information, processing status, and other accessioning data.Hensen 1992, 274The first of these was the idea of process control. Unlike other bibliographic materials that are more or less confined between their covers, archival materials are mutable over a time/space continuum. In other words, things happen to them after they enter institutional custody (they are weeded, sorted, re-sorted, added to, conserved, preserved, etc.), and these changes have a direct impact on the description of the materials. The bibliographic description of such material must, therefore, be able to accommodate and record these changes.Boles 2005, 147–148As more and more repositories automate record control information, data from these sources should be integrated into a system that will provide needed “process control” information for many subsequent archival functions ranging from storage, preservation, and statistical accounting to arrangement, description, and access.
