Standards

Developed and maintained by Collections Trust, Spectrum is the UK collection management standard used around the world. Intended for museums of all sizes and any collection type, as well as institutions with museum-like collections, Spectrum is recognized internationally as the industry standard for Collections Management in museums.

Read about Spectrum 5.0 on the Collections Trust website.

Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules 2nd Edition (AACR2) is published jointly by the American Library Association, the Canadian Library Association, and the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (in the UK). AACR2 is used in the construction of catalogues and other lists in general libraries of all sizes. The rules cover the description and provision of access points for all commonly collected library material.

Read about AACR2 here.

The Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) is a Government of Canada-supported organization that provides a networked interface to Canada's heritage. CHIN assists Canadian museums in documenting, managing, and sharing information about their collections, which in turn ensures that this information is accessible now and in the future. The CHIN Guide to Museum Standards Department of Canadian Heritage contains basic information on why museum documentation standards are important, describes the main types of standards and how they are used in Canadian museums, and provides users with access to the standards.

Read about the CHIN Guide here.

Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS) is an output-neutral set of rules for describing archives, personal papers, and manuscript collections, and can be applied to all material types.

Read about DACS here.

The Dublin Core Schema is a small set of vocabulary terms that can be used to describe digital resources (video, images, web pages, etc.), as well as physical resources such as books or CDs, and objects like artworks.

Read about Dublin Core here.

Encoded Archival Context – Corporate bodies, Persons and Families (EAC-CPF) is an XML standard for encoding information about the creators of archival materials (i.e. a corporate body, person or family), including their relationships to (a) resources (books, collections, papers, etc.) and (b) other corporate bodies, persons and families.

Read about EAC-CPF here.

EAD (Encoded Archival Description) is a standard for encoding archival finding aids using Extensible Markup Language (XML). The standard is maintained in the Network Development and MARC Standards Office of the Library of Congress (LC) in partnership with the Society of American Archivists.

Read about EAD here.

Film identification – Enhancing interoperability of metadata – Element sets and structures: EN 15907 defines a metadata set for the comprehensive description of cinematographic works, including the various incarnations it can assume during its life cycle.

Read about EN 15907 here.

Exchangeable image file format (EXIF) is a specification for the image file format used by digital cameras. The specification uses the existing JPEG, TIFF Rev. 6.0, and RIFF WAV file formats, with the addition of specific metadata tags.

International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (ISAAR(CPF)) provides guidance for preparing archival authority records for descriptions of entities (corporate bodies, persons and families) associated with the creation and maintenance of archives.

Read about ISAAR(CPF) here.

General International Standard Archival Description (ISAD(G)) defines the elements that should be included in an archival finding aid. It was approved by the International Council on Archives (ICA/CIA) as an international framework standard to register archival documents produced by corporations, persons and families. ISAD(G) provides general guidance for the preparation of archival descriptions. It is used in conjunction with existing national standards or as the basis for the development of national standards.

Read about ISAD(G) here.

International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) is a set of rules produced by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) to describe a wide range of library material within the context of a catalogue. The consolidated edition of the ISBD was published in 2007. It superseded earlier separate ISBDs that were published for monographs, older monographic publications, cartographic material, serials and other continuing resources, electronic resources, non-book material, and printed music. IFLA’s ISBD Review Group is responsible for maintaining the ISBD.

Read about ISBD here.

The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a unique commercial book identifier.

UNICODE – The Universal Character Set (UCS) is defined by the ISO/IEC 10646 International Standard as a character set on which many encodings are based. It contains nearly a hundred thousand abstract characters, each identified by an unambiguous name and an integer number called its code point.

Characters (letters, numbers, symbols, ideograms, logograms, etc.) from the many languages, scripts, and traditions of the world are represented in the UCS with unique code points. The inclusiveness of the UCS is continually improving as characters from previously unrepresented writing systems are added.

Thesaurus management standard ISO 2788 is an ISO international standard intended to ensure consistent practice within a single indexing agency, or between different agencies. The official title of the standard is Guidelines for the establishment and development of monolingual thesauri.

An International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) is an eight digit serial number used to uniquely identify a serial publication, such as a magazine. The ISSN is especially helpful in distinguishing between serials with the same title. ISSNs are used in ordering, cataloguing, interlibrary loans, and other practices in connection with serial literature.

Lightweight Information Describing Objects (LIDO) is an XML Schema for Contributing Content to Cultural Heritage Repositories. LIDO is the result of a joint effort of the CDWA Lite, museumdat, Spectrum and CIDOC CRM communities. The schema combines the CDWA Lite and museumdat schemas and is informed by Spectrum. Being CIDOC-CRM compliant, it aims at contributing information of all kinds of museum objects for resource discovery.

Read about LIDO here.

Manual of Archival Description (MAD) is a British guideline for describing archival collections.

MAD is intended to be a standard for the production of finding aids; it has rejected the bibliographic model as a standard for archival description. . . . MAD's focus on more rigorous models for output reflects perhaps the British archival tradition, where more emphasis has been placed on classification schemes and custodianship than on description (from Archives terminology).

MARC XML is an XML schema based on the common MARC21 standards. MARCXML was developed by the US Library of Congress and adopted by it and others as a means of easy sharing of, and networked access to, bibliographic information.

The OAI-PMH technical infrastructure, specified in the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), defines a mechanism for data providers to expose their metadata. This protocol mandates that individual institutions map their metadata to the Dublin Core, a simple and common metadata set for this purpose. Other metadata standards can also be used, as well as propriety models.

Read about OAI-PMH here.

Resource Description and Access (RDA) is a standard for descriptive cataloguing, providing instructions and guidelines on formulating bibliographic data. Intended for use by libraries and other cultural organizations such as museums and archives, RDA is the successor to Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2).

Read about RDA here.

Search / Retrieve via URL (SRU) is a standard search protocol for Internet search queries, utilizing CQL Common Query Language (CQL), a standard query syntax for representing queries.

The Australian Series System is an archival control or metadata system primarily used to describe records in the custody of archival institutions.

IPTC defined set of metadata properties that can be applied to images.

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a family of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications originally designed as a metadata data model. It has come to be used as a general method for conceptual description or modelling of information that is implemented in web resources, using a variety of syntax notations and data serialization formats.

Standard Interchange Protocol (SIP / SIP2) allows self-service machines in the library to exchange data with the library automation system.

Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) is a family of formal languages designed for representation of thesauri, classification schemes, taxonomies, subject-heading systems, or any other type of structured controlled vocabulary. SKOS is built upon RDF and RDFS and its objective is to enable easy publication of controlled structured vocabularies for the Semantic Web. SKOS is currently developed within the W3C framework.

The Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) is a standard for processing and storing standardized and proprietary metadata, created by Adobe Systems Inc. XMP standardizes the definition, creation, and processing of extensible metadata. Serialized XMP can be embedded into a significant number of popular file formats without breaking their readability by non-XMP-aware applications. Embedding metadata avoids many problems that occur when metadata is stored separately. XMP is used in PDF, photography and photo editing applications.