ABSTRACT
At least one of the British university training courses had begun to offer a course component in archival computing by 1970. The Society of Archivists began holding annual in-service courses in the subject in 1982. After these tentative beginnings groups of archivists began to prepare for what seemed the imminent age of the computer by preparing an analysis of the structure of data elements that were needed for archival description. The Methods of Listing working party (of the Specialist Repositories Group of the Society) had already been at work on this for a year. The working party produced a draft data structure, and this was examined at a series of open meetings held at a variety of places, and finally reached a sixth version. At this stage (1984) the Archival Description Project at Liverpool University, which was working on a standard for non-computerized archival description, took up the work and incorporated the data structure into the first edition of its Manual of Archival Description (MAD). This first edition was essentially a discussion draft. The project continued to hold work shops and discussion groups in different places, and when the (for the moment, definitive) second edition (MAD2) appeared early in 1990 it could be claimed that there had been wide acceptance in professional circles.1 It was used as one of the three basic documents considered by the international commission that drew up the General International Standard Archival Description ISAD(G), published in its definitive version in 1993.2
MAD2 was prepared at a time when the only models available for comparison were the American standards adapted from AACR2. The Archival Description Project took the decision not to follow this approach, but to examine the descriptive practices of archivists in real
life, and construct rules based upon this observation. In consequence, Part I of MAD2 is an important analysis of the essential nature of archival work in description, which makes clear (among other things) exactly in what ways it is different from the work of library cataloguing.
