Susan
Hooray! Of course it's not heresy Susan.
When I started in my previous job at Railtrack I discovered that our civil
engineers had devised a system to code all individual railway lines in the
country with a four-character code (three letters plus optional number) to
create the railway equivalent of road numbers.
However, rather than start off at Penzance with "AAA1", which would have
allowed them to end up in the North of Scotland with something like "MMM9"
(thus leaving plenty of spare codes for future new lines) they could not
resist the temptation to make the letter codes "mean something".
Thus we ended up with "ECM1" ("East Coast Main" [Line]) and "LEN2" ("Leeds
Northern") etc., and every proposal for a new code had to be checked
against a database to see if that combination of letters and numbers had
already been used as a mnemonic.
Ever since then I have vowed that all reference codes and other identifiers
should have one purpose only - to act as a shorthand way of uniquely
identifying an individual archive item - which is a job best done (usually)
by creating a single running number sequence for all reference codes. Why
bother creating higher-level reference codes which only "reference"
paragraphs of descriptive text - only the lowest level of referencing
refers to an actual document.
As Susan says, our other requirements of recording provenance and
re-creating original order are discrete tasks - don't overload them onto
the poor old reference code. Use parent/child relationships between
entries in a catalogue, or even create an "original sort order" field. If
differentiation between the same running number in different repositories
is required, then get yourself into the National Register of Archives, and
use your NRA repository code as the prefix to the document item number.
Despite our oft-repeated maxim that archives are not defined by age or
medium, many of our professional habits are simply shibboleths originating
in a printed paper catalogue mentality, not genuine professional principles.
This is the kind of discussion we should have more of!
Cheers
Richard Taylor
==================================================
Richard Taylor
Curator, Archive Collections
National Railway Museum
Leeman Road
YORK YO26 4XJ
ENGLAND
Tel +44 (0)1904-686289
Fax +44 (0)1904-611112
Email [log in to unmask]
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|