Technical Subcommittee on Describing Archives: A Content Standard (TS-DACS) Annual Report July 2016 The Technical Subcommittee on Describing Archives: A Content Standard (TS-DACS) has had a very active and productive year in fulfillment of its charge to oversee the timely and ongoing intellectual and technical maintenance and development of Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS). This report covers the period August 2015-July 2016. A major focus of the committee over the past year has been revising the current education offerings for DACS, led by an Education Team chaired by Elise Dunham with Maureen Callahan, Cynthia Harbeson, Adrien Hilton and Susan Luftschein as members. This project began by identifying content in the current day-long Introduction to DACS seminar that could be improved and better delivered as discrete online webinars. Volunteers were solicited to help develop content for these short videos, and members of the Education Team collaborated with these volunteers to revise content as necessary. The ongoing work of this team also includes a revision of the current day-long Introduction to DACS with overhauled exercises focusing on applying DACS rules in a collaborative and interactive environment. Another accomplishment this year was transitioning DACS to a version control system in order to improve transparency of the revision process, manage actual revisions more robustly, and provide content that can be easily serialized to multiple formats for presentation online or in print. This work, which was done by Adriane Hanson and Hillel Arnold, involved migrating DACS content to Markdown and placing it under version control in , as well as creating documentation regarding the overall revision process, converting Markdown to other formats, and how to use Github to suggest changes or comment on an existing change proposal. The committee also completed a minor revision to the Preface of DACS to , which was initially conceived as an effort to provide additional guidance to the archival community about the application of DACS rules, a need the committee felt was better met with a revision of education offerings as described above. Additional change proposals to add or amend existing crosswalks are in progress. TS-DACS also provided comment on several changes to companion standards, proposals and tools, including revisions to RDA, a proposal from NARA regarding authorized forms of names, and a requirements document for development of the ArchivesSpace public interface.
Technical Subcommittee on Describing Archives: A Content Standard (TS-DACS) Annual Report July 2016 The Technical Subcommittee on Describing Archives: A Content Standard (TS-DACS) has had a very active and productive year in fulfillment of its charge to oversee the timely and ongoing intellectual and technical maintenance and development of Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS). This report covers the period August 2015-July 2016. A major focus of the committee over the past year has been revising the current education offerings for DACS, led by an Education Team chaired by Elise Dunham with Maureen Callahan, Cynthia Harbeson, Adrien Hilton and Susan Luftschein as members. This project began by identifying content in the current day-long Introduction to DACS seminar that could be improved and better delivered as discrete online webinars. Volunteers were solicited to help develop content for these short videos, and members of the Education Team collaborated with these volunteers to revise content as necessary. The ongoing work of this team also includes a revision of the current day-long Introduction to DACS with overhauled exercises focusing on applying DACS rules in a collaborative and interactive environment. Another accomplishment this year was transitioning DACS to a version control system in order to improve transparency of the revision process, manage actual revisions more robustly, and provide content that can be easily serialized to multiple formats for presentation online or in print. This work, which was done by Adriane Hanson and Hillel Arnold, involved migrating DACS content to Markdown and placing it under version control in , as well as creating documentation regarding the overall revision process, converting Markdown to other formats, and how to use Github to suggest changes or comment on an existing change proposal. The committee also completed a minor revision to the Preface of DACS to , which was initially conceived as an effort to provide additional guidance to the archival community about the application of DACS rules, a need the committee felt was better met with a revision of education offerings as described above. Additional change proposals to add or amend existing crosswalks are in progress. TS-DACS also provided comment on several changes to companion standards, proposals and tools, including revisions to RDA, a proposal from NARA regarding authorized forms of names, and a requirements document for development of the ArchivesSpace public interface.
TS-DACS%20Annual%20Report%20Jul%202016_0.docx