Managing the Present: Metadata as Archival Description

Traditional archival dsecription undertaken at the terminal stages of the life cycle has had two deleterious effects on the archival profession. First, it has resulted in enormous, and in some cases, insurmoutable processing backlogs. Second, it has limited our ability to capture crucial contextual and structural information throughout the life cycle of record-keeping systems that are essential for fully understanding the fonds in our institutions. This shortcoming has resulted in an inadequate knowledge base for appraisal and access provision. Such complications will only become more magnified as distributed computing and complex software applications continue to expand throughout organizations. A metadata strategy for archival description will help mitigate these problems and enhance the organizational profile of archivists who will come to be seen as valuable organizational knowledge and accountability managers.