Current DACS principles, 2019-present Revision history TS-DACS began re-evaluating Describing Archives: A Content Standard for alignment with current archival theory and practice in 2016. Following an initial review over the summer of that year, TS-DACS organized an in-person principles revision meeting that took place concurrently with the SAA annual meeting in Atlanta. Later in 2016, TS-DACS requested funds from SAA to facilitate another meeting of TS-DACS members and other invited experts to take place outside of the annual meeting. This request was eventually granted and the second principles revision meeting took place in March of 2017. TS-DACS put out a call for comment on the revised principles in June of 2017. Feedback from this open comment period was analyzed and incorporated throughout 2018. In August of 2018, a final call for comment was published. The final revised principles were submitted to SAA's council and approved in May 2019.
Current principles • Archival description expresses professional ethics and values. • Users are the fundamental reason for archival description. • Because archival description privileges intellectual content in context, descriptive rules apply equally to all records, regardless of format or carrier type. • Records, agents, activities, and the relationships between them are the four fundamental concepts that constitute archival description. • Archival description must be clear about what archivists know, what they don’t know, and how they know it. • Archivists must document and make discoverable the actions they take on records. • Archival description is accessible. • Archival description should be easy to use, re-use, and share. • Each collection within a repository must have an archival description. • Archivists must have a user-driven reason to enhance existing archival description. • Archival description is a continuous intellectual endeavor.
DACS founding principles, 2004-2019 At its first publication, DACS was guided by a set of 8 principles, which serve to elucidate why archival description is separate from library description and to give guidance in applying DACS. These have since been superseded. They were as follows: • "Records in archives possess unique characteristics. • "The principle of
respect des fonds is the basis of archival arrangement and description. • "Arrangement involves the identification of groupings within the material. • "Description reflects arrangement. • "The rules of description apply to all archival materials, regardless of form or medium. • "The principles of archival description apply equally to records created by corporate bodies, individuals, or families. • "Archival descriptions may be presented at varying levels of detail to produce a variety of outputs. • "The creators of archival materials, as well as the materials themselves, must be described." == Part I Describing Archival Materials ==