Description Writ Large

The traditions of archival arrangement and description and bibliographic description are emblematic of the work of the archivist and the librarian, and are well developed. Furthermore, we understand the purposes and products of the regimes of these two lineages (Svenonius, 2000; MacNeil 1995; InterPARES 2007). Yet there are questions that surface about the degree and level of interaction that can obtain between two regimes. In this paper I will address some of the similarities and differences that obtain between two descriptive regimes. On the one hand we have archival arrangement and description and diplomatics. On the other we have bibliographic description, which includes subject analysis. The points of similarities include providing access points, capturing the form and extent of resources at hand, and sharing these in databases using encodings like Machine Readable Cataloguing (MARC) or Extensible Markup Language (XML). The differences, perhaps are more interesting, and furthermore, provide us with a view of how we might cross-pollinate research and theory. In this paper I will: 1) introduce the two lineages, 2) identify their purposes, which belie their differences and then, 3) point to potential areas of future collaborative research at the intersections of these areas. The future of description, if it is to be a collaboration between these lineages is going to be description writ large