Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS) is a set of rules for describing archives, personal papers, and
manuscriptA manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...
collections. The descriptive standard can be utilized for all types of archival material. In 2004, DACS was adopted by the
Society of American ArchivistsThe Society of American Archivists is the oldest and largest archivist association in North America, serving the educational and informational needs of more than 5,000 individual and institutional members...
as an official SAA standard.
Relation to other standards
Upon adoption by SAA, DACS superseded the former standard for archival material, Archives, Personal Papers, and Manuscripts (APPM). It has now been widely adopted by the archival community throughout the United States. Also, DACS expands on the basic rules for describing archival material that are found in chapter 4 of the cataloging standard,
AACR2AACR2 stands for the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, Second Edition. It is published jointly by the American Library Association, the Canadian Library Association, and the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in the UK. The editor is Michael Gorman, a British-born...
. DACS also provides crosswalks from DACS to
MARCMARC, MAchine-Readable Cataloging, is a data format and set of related standards used by libraries to encode and share information about books and other material they collect...
and
Encoded Archival DescriptionEncoded Archival Description is an XML standard for encoding archival finding aids, maintained by the Library of Congress in partnership with the Society of American Archivists.-History:EAD originated in 1993, at the University of California, Berkeley...
(EAD). DACS specifies only the type of content, not the structural or encoding requirements or the actual verbiage to be used; it is therefore suitable for use in conjunction with structural and encoding standards such as MARC and EAD and with controlled vocabularies such as
MeSHMedical Subject Headings is a comprehensive controlled vocabulary for the purpose of indexing journal articles and books in the life sciences; it can also serve as a thesaurus that facilitates searching...
, LCSH,
AATThe Art & Architecture Thesaurus is a controlled vocabulary used for describing items of art, architecture, and material culture. The AAT contains generic terms, such as "cathedral," but no proper names, such as "Cathedral of Notre Dame." The AAT is used by, among others, museums, art libraries,...
, and so on.
It should also be noted that DACS is the US implementation of international archival descriptive standards such as
ISAD(G)ISAD defines the elements that should be included in an archival finding aid. It was approved by the International Council on Archives as a standard to register archival documents produced by corporations, persons and families.-History:After initial activities since 1988 supported by UNESCO, a...
and ISAAR(CPF).