Apologies for duplications through cross-posting! To archivists attending the SAA annual meeting in Denver later this month: What is ISAD(G) (General International Standard Archival Description) all about and how can it help me in my day-to-day work? This question might well be on the minds of archivists today. ISAD(G) has just been through its first 5-year revision cycle (a process in which SAA's Technical Subcommittee on Descriptive Standards participated) and has emerged stronger and more clearly articulated. Michael Fox of the Minnesota Historical Society represented the SAA on the Committee on Descriptive Standards, the International Council on Archives (ICA) unit charged with the care and feeding of ISAD(G). ISAD(G) defines standard elements of archival description. It does not specify how they should be arranged in a specific output or descriptive product (in other words, it will not tell you what your finding aids should look like, either encoded in EAD or in a word-processed document), nor does it specify content for elements of archival description (in other words, it doesn't supplant content standards like APPM and RAD). ISAD(G) doesn't define anything new; in fact, many of our existing descriptions are likely compatible to a great extent with ISAD(G)'s elements. ISAD(G) seems here to stay as a powerful tool for archivists the world over to use in standardizing the types of information they use in describing their collections, record groups, and fonds. As more of us turn to the World Wide Web as a venue for delivering both surrogate descriptions of our materials and, increasingly, digital objects themselves, the stakes are higher for us to engage in standardization activities in our own repositories that will make our archival descriptions and digital materials (both digital originals and digital facsimiles) easier to use online for traditional and newly discovered patrons. The Description Section's annual Finding Aids Fair has generally been focused on the finding aid as a freely floating object for inspection, divorced from any analysis of the descriptive standards that either do or do not underpin it. At the 64th SAA annual meeting in Denver, in the Exhibitor's Hall that will be open on Thursday and Friday, August 31-September 1, the Description Section will hold a different kind of Finding Aid Fair. The 2000 Fair will focus on providing those who wander through with a better understanding of ISAD(G) and its relationship to the various descriptive tools that we produce (e.g., word-processed, EAD-encoded, or database-derived finding aids and collection-level MARC records). All interested attendees at this year's annual meeting are invited to bring along examples of your current finding aids or other descriptive tools so that you can evaluate for yourselves how your tools fare in relation to the international standard embodied by ISAD(G). The 2000 Finding Aid Fair is being designed to be self-paced and self-educational, so no one will be looking over your shoulder analyzing your descriptive tools. There is no single "right" way of implementing ISAD(G) in your repository practice, but there will be several examples of finding aids that illustrate a variety of ways of incorporating ISAD(G). Also featured will be crosswalks to help attendees understand how ISAD(G) elements map to encoding standards such as EAD and USMARC. The Finding Aids Fair will hopefully be informative and useful even if you don't choose to bring along one of your own finding aids to evaluate. Much of the information presented at the Finding Aids Fair will be made available on the Web following the SAA meeting in Denver. So bring a finding aid! Bring a friend! Plan to spend some time in Denver learning a bit more about how ISAD(G) might be beneficial to you right where you work! -- Bill [log in to unmask] Manuscripts Librarian | The UCI Libraries Department of Special Collections | University of California 949 824.3113 | P.O. Box 19557 949 824.2472 FAX | Irvine, CA 92623-9557