Application of DACS Content Standard in Describing and Organizing Documents of Digital Archives

This research discusses the application of metadata in describing and organizing the information and documents of digital archives. It also presents a detailed account of the DACS content standard in describing the content objects available in digital archives.

This research has been done by library methods. In this article, on the basis of a handbook for archives offered by the American Library Association in 2004, and also based on the parts and structure of the DACS content standard, the core elements for describing each of the content objects and entities available in digital archives are introduced Research value: Since limited research has been carried out on content standards and the role of these standards in organizing the digital archives’ content objects, this article tries to introduce the DACS content standard and to present this standard's core elements table in order to reduce the problems of incompatibility, and help different archives in retrieving and exchanging their entities with other archives’ entities.

Based on the findings of this research, DACS is one of the content standards used in archives, for preparing sets of rules for describing Archives, Personal Papers, and Manuscripts (APPM) and all types of content objects, with an emphasis on the digital world.

Standards like DACS provide an effective and coherent system for archives and archivists and therefore create the required coordination between different information collections.