Representing Archival Descriptive Metadata in a DSpace Environment

Archiving born-digital materials brings with it the problem of how—or if—to implement standard hierarchical modes of archival description in an environment where the user can potentially make granular searches of repository item-level metadata and the primary materials themselves, thus bypassing mediating finding aids and even disregarding collection and series boundaries altogether. In this essay I will discuss some of the problems of providing archival description as metadata in the case of digital archival materials, especially as seen in the context of the DSpace digital repository software environment, which instantiates a specific information structure itself. Examples will be taken from practice as developed in work at the School of Information on collections ingested into the School’s institutional repository, and some additional unconventional descriptive practices will be described.