Society of American Archivists
Encyclopedia
The Society of American Archivists (established 1936) is the oldest and largest archivist
association
in North America
, serving the education
al and information
al needs of more than 5,000 individual and institutional members. It partnered with the Library of Congress
in developing Encoded Archival Description
- an XML
Document Type Definition
- a standard for encoding archival finding aid
s, allowing them to be made accessible online.
The Society supports its members and the archival profession through strong publication and professional workshop programs and semi-annual meetings. The publication program is responsible for putting out a semi-annual refereed scholarly journal, the American Archivist
, and many books and manuals addressing aspects of the archival profession. Workshops are given all
across the United States and attend to current archival concerns and issues such as Encoded Archival Description
, the digitizing
of archival materials, and preservation and conservation of materials, among others.
The programs it offers include: Online On-Demand Programs, Online Real Time Programs and Face to Face Programs.
In 1942, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected as an honorary member of the SAA due to his commitment to archiving federal, state and local government documents.
Archivist
An archivist is a professional who assesses, collects, organizes, preserves, maintains control over, and provides access to information determined to have long-term value. The information maintained by an archivist can be any form of media...
association
Voluntary association
A voluntary association or union is a group of individuals who enter into an agreement as volunteers to form a body to accomplish a purpose.Strictly speaking, in many jurisdictions no formalities are necessary to start an association...
in North America
North America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...
, serving the education
Education
Education in its broadest, general sense is the means through which the aims and habits of a group of people lives on from one generation to the next. Generally, it occurs through any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts...
al and information
Information
Information in its most restricted technical sense is a message or collection of messages that consists of an ordered sequence of symbols, or it is the meaning that can be interpreted from such a message or collection of messages. Information can be recorded or transmitted. It can be recorded as...
al needs of more than 5,000 individual and institutional members. It partnered with the Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
in developing Encoded Archival Description
Encoded Archival Description
Encoded Archival Description is an XML standard for encoding archival finding aids, maintained by the Library of Congress in partnership with the Society of American Archivists.-History:EAD originated in 1993, at the University of California, Berkeley...
- an XML
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
Document Type Definition
Document Type Definition
Document Type Definition is a set of markup declarations that define a document type for SGML-family markup languages...
- a standard for encoding archival finding aid
Finding aid
A finding aid is a document containing detailed information about a specific collection of papers or records within an archive. They are used by researchers to determine whether information within a collection is relevant to their research...
s, allowing them to be made accessible online.
The Society supports its members and the archival profession through strong publication and professional workshop programs and semi-annual meetings. The publication program is responsible for putting out a semi-annual refereed scholarly journal, the American Archivist
American Archivist
The American Archivist is the official publication of the Society of American Archivists . The American Archivist seeks to reflect thinking about theoretical and practical developments in the archival profession, particularly in North America; about the relationships between archivists and the...
, and many books and manuals addressing aspects of the archival profession. Workshops are given all
across the United States and attend to current archival concerns and issues such as Encoded Archival Description
Encoded Archival Description
Encoded Archival Description is an XML standard for encoding archival finding aids, maintained by the Library of Congress in partnership with the Society of American Archivists.-History:EAD originated in 1993, at the University of California, Berkeley...
, the digitizing
Digitizing
Digitizing or digitization is the representation of an object, image, sound, document or a signal by a discrete set of its points or samples. The result is called digital representation or, more specifically, a digital image, for the object, and digital form, for the signal...
of archival materials, and preservation and conservation of materials, among others.
The programs it offers include: Online On-Demand Programs, Online Real Time Programs and Face to Face Programs.
In 1942, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected as an honorary member of the SAA due to his commitment to archiving federal, state and local government documents.