Exploring Relationship Description: A Report from the Describing Relationships Workshop, Simmons College, February 2018

Abstract

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