Standards are important for many reasons. Consistency creates quality, and standards create consistency. Professional standards for archival descriptions involve a hierarchical structure. This ensures that users will find your archival database easy to navigate. This interesting topic came from the blog, Eloquent, in their post, “Understanding Archival Hierarchies.”
Sometimes, figuring out where to start is the biggest hurdle. We found this video presentation helpful for users to figure out how to create the structure as the data is entered. Other applications also contain hierarchical structures, which are the classification scheme for records and the storage locations for physical items. This second video presentation illustrates the ease of managing any hierarchical structure using Web-based software.
Developing a classification system organized into conceptually similar categories can help users gain a better understanding of the taxonomy subject area. How the content is classified impacts the findability of your data. Professionals should look for an experienced builder of solid standards-based taxonomies to associate content for appropriate machine-assisted indexing. Access Innovations can provide solutions that are ANSI compliant.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
