Washington County Heritage is a collaborative project with many contributors. We want to make sure that when we describe items -- like a photograph or a letter or a diary -- that we are all following the same set of standards for how we enter those descriptions.
Having agreements on how we create a title, a date or a subject makes our items look consistent and allows users to search the database in a more predictable fashion. Also, very importantly, following standard rules allows us to share our collections with other standards-based online repositories. Regional, national and international library catalogs and digital archives databases can "read" our descriptions and harvest links into our site, as long as we follow professional standards. This helps users around the world to find our material!
The rules for how we enter Titles, Creators, Dates, Subjects, etc. are based on standards that are published by organizations such as the Society of American Archivists, the American Library Association, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, and others. We also follow more specific best practices developed by the Orbis Cascade Alliance of academic institutions in the Pacific Northwest. The Pacific University Archives maintains a master page documenting the sources of our rules (see Pacific University Archives: Descriptive Standards).
The pages on this web site, linked through the navigation above, provide a guide to following these rules that we hope will be usable by volunteers who may not have other professional archival training.