Person:

Pyzynski, Susan

Interested in collaboratively exploring the potential of EAC-CPF, the Beinecke Library at Yale and the Houghton Library at Harvard embarked on a year-long project to gain experience with the new standard and, in the process, strengthen connections between disparate but deep holdings of lexicographer Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) and his circle. The project team set out to document metadata best practices while developing and maintaining one set of records and to discover the practical limits and possibilities of rich content within the EAC-CPF context. This article outlines the project’s challenges, lessons learned, and remaining questions.

Archivists have included relationship information as a component of contextual and content description; however, they have not been called on to formalize that information. Rather, relationships have been identified and defined through informal narrative contexts, and depend on the archivist’s interpretative work and determination. Additionally, descriptive standards provide little guidance on the explicit description of relationships. To begin to address these issues, a group of archivists gathered in Boston to explore the challenges and opportunities in describing relationships. This paper serves as an account of that workshop from two perspectives: first, it documents the results of the day's discussions and provides some preliminary recommendations, and second, it provides an account and evaluation of the strategy of a local, face-to-face event to explore the inherently complex and interpretive activity of the description of relationship