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)

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

undertaking the development of standards (e. g. harmonized conceptual framework, standardized terminology, comparable arrangement practices)“.

The references to terminology in this agenda affirmed its relationship to standards and with this relationship in mind, the participants determined that two immediate next steps should be taken:

1. the formulation of a statement of principles for archival description, and

2. the drafting of general rules based on these principles, followed by development of rules for description covering various levels of collectivity and various media.

The principles were to include a glossary designed to pave over the pitfalls of terminology. It was determined that the rule drafting effort could most easily avoid linguistic barriers by building upon rules already developed within a single language. The base language chosen was English because major manuals or rules for archival description had in that year been published in three English-speaking countries5.

Apparently satisfied with the plans put forward by the Paris consultation, UNESCO agreed to continue to support efforts to carry them out by an ICA Working Party on Descriptive Standards. This Working Party - made up of representatives from Canada, Germany, Malaysia, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, and the United States, convened at Hoehr-Grenzhausen, Germany, in October 1990 to consider the two documents commissioned by the Paris consultation.

The glossary endorsed by the Hoehr-Grenzhausen Working Party consisted of terms for the following concepts:

Access point. A name, term, etc. by which a description may be searched and identified.

Arrangement The intellectual operations involved in the identification and organization of archives based on the principle of provenance, reflecting the administrative stmcture and/or competence or function of the originating agency.

Authority data Standardized forms of names (personal, corporate or geographic) used as index entries (access points), together with other relevant information associated with the names, such as the sources of the name, notes on usage for the standardized form as an indexing term or access point, etc.

Corporate body. An organization or group of persons that is identified by a particular name and that acts, or may act, as an entity. This term corresponds to the European legal concept of a juridical person or American legal concept of an

5 The publications are Rules for Archival Description, Chapters 0, 1 and 2, prepared under the direction of the Planning Committee on Descriptive Standards of the Bureau of Canadian Archivists (Canada, 1990) [herein referred to as RAD]; Manual of Archival Description, ed. by Michael Cook and Margaret Procter (Great Britain, second edition 1989) [herein referred to as MAD 2]; and Archives,Personal Papers and Manuscripts : A Cataloging Manual for Archival Repositories, Historical Societies, and Manuscript Libraries, compiled by Steven L. Hensen (United States of America, second edition 1989) [herein referred to as APPM 2] ; see Appendix B [Annex to the french translation of this paper].

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