Sonderband 2. International Council on Archives. Dritte Europäische Archivkonferenz, Wien 11. bis 15. Mai 1993. Tagungsprotokolle (1996)

3. Session / Séance. Sharing of Experience and Exchange of Staff / Partage d’Expériences et Echange des Personnes - Thibodeau, Sharon: The Pitfalls of Terminology and linguistic Barriers / Pieges de la Terminologie et Barrieres linguistiques (english 207 - français 217)

elements of description, a phrase used by almost every representative to the Ottawa conference to mean the categories of information that form an archival description.

fonds d’archives, defined by the representative of the Bureau of Canadian Archivists as „the whole of the documents of an nature that every administrative body, every physical or corporate entity, automatically and organically accumulates by reason of its functions or of its activity“.

level of arrangement , a phrase used by several participants to refer to any one of the possible subdivisions of a set of archival materials.

level of description referred to by the representative from Italy as the amount of detail included in an archival description.

multilevel description, an expression used to refer to the result of the work of archivists who describe „archival materials [at various levels of arrangement] in a certain relationship to each other“.

original order, defined by the Dutch representative as „the principle that the original order must not be disturbed by the archivist. Only obvious mistakes ought to be rectified“.

principle of provenance , defined by the Dutch representative as „the principle that archives of a given records creator must not be intermingled with those of other records creators“.

rules, a word used by various representatives to refer to the guidance governing the content of elements of description.

subject heading recognized by representatives of China and Sweden as an important type of access point, but one that requires a distinctly archival - as opposed to book-based - vocabulary.

unit of description , a phrase used by the representative of Mexico to refer to the archival entity that is the subject of a description.

It became clear during the week-long Ottawa meeting that descriptive standards must incorporate these important concepts, and that a glossary of terms for them would have to be accepted by the international community as a pre-requisite to a successful standardization effort.

A plan of action proposed by the Ottawa group caught the attention of the Executive Director of the ICA, who sought funding from UNESCO to begin to carry it out. As a first step, he convened a „restricted consultation on the planning of a long term international action for the development of descriptive standards for archives“ and he invited representatives from countries in which archival descriptive standards were under study in a systematic way4. The ICA-developed agenda of the meeting, held in Paris in 1989, included „consideration of conditions to be met for

3. Session/Séance: Thibodeau, Pitfalls of Terminology and linguistic Barriers

4 The meeting was attended by Lorenz Mikoletzky (Austria), Hugo L. P. Stibbe (Canada), Ghislain Brunei (France), Habiba Yahaya (Malaysia), Pedro Gonzales (Spain), Christopher Kitching (United Kingdom) and Sharon Thibodeau (United States).

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