Descriptive Practices for Electronic Records: Deciding What Is Essential and Imagining What Is Possible

The challenges raised by electronic records present an opportunity to define the essential purposes for description: to reassess its objectives, agents, and timing: and to imagine new approaches that harries the power of information technology while respecting archival principles. This article discusses how archival description must support the need to identify, gain access, understand the meaning, interpret the content, determine authenticity, and manage electronic records to ensure continuing access. Management of metadata is proposed as an alternative strategy to current descriptive practices.