The disruptive impact of digitised and born-digital records has shaken ways of working, as well as ways of interpreting the International Standard for Archival Description ISAD(G).
We are sharing a position paper which outlines the evolution and current state of cataloguing practices for digital records at The National Archives. Both technology and archival practice will continue to evolve as we tackle our biggest challenge to become a digital archive by instinct and design: Digital Cataloguing Practices at The National Archives (PDF, 0.2MB).
As our descriptive practice evolves we must also review how we manage our catalogue data. Our catalogue data model has remained virtually unchanged since 2000. We are now engaging on a project to determine a sustainable data model that opens up the door to a master catalogue to hold one set of metadata for all our records regardless of medium.
Our proposition is to move towards a single pan-archival linked data catalogue, removing the separation between physical and digital records. Read about Project Omega if you would like to find out more about what methods, standards and technologies we are using to achieve this ambition.