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Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS) is a set of rules for describing archives, personal papers, and manuscript collections. The descriptive standard can be utilized for all types of archival material. In 2004, DACS was adopted by the Society of American Archivists as an official standard. In January 2013, the Society officially adopted the Second Edition, after review by their Standards Committee, its Technical Subcommittee for Describing Archives: A Content Standard, and the general archival community.

Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS) is a standard used for describing materials in an archive. First adopted by the Society of American Archivists (SAA) in March 2004, DACS was updated with a Second Edition in 2013. DACS is broken down into a set of rules used in crafting archival descriptions, and guidelines for creating authority records in archives.

It is currently maintained by the SAA's Technical Subcommittee on Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Overview

When fully adopted in 2005, DACS replaced Archives, Personal Papers, and Manuscripts, the previous SAA archival cataloging standard. As of the Second Edition, it consists of two parts: Part I, Describing Archival Materials, and Part II, Archival Authority Records. DACS is mostly concerned with providing a framework for creating an archival catalog through description and authority records, and is closely related to both the library-focused cataloging rules of Resource Description and Access (RDA) and the international description standards formed by ISAD(G).

Principles of DACS

Use of DACS is guided by a set of 8 principles, which serve to elucidate why archival description is separate from library description and to give guidance in applying DACS. They are as follows:

1. Records in archives possess unique characteristics.
2. The principle of respect des fonds is the basis of archival arrangement and description.
3. Arrangement involves the identification of groupings within the material.
4. Description reflects arrangement.
5. The rules of description apply to all archival materials, regardless of form or medium.
6. The principles of archival description apply equally to records created by corporate bodies, individuals, or families.
7. Archival descriptions may be presented at varying levels of detail to produce a variety of outputs.
8. The creators of archival materials, as well as the materials themselves, must be described.

Part I Describing Archival Materials

The first part of DACS deals with rules for crafting archival description. It can be broken down into levels of description, with each level adding a layer of complexity. DACS discretely describes these levels as Single Level Required, Single Level Optimum, Single Level Added Value, Multilevel Required, Multilevel Optimum, and Multilevel Added Value. Every level requires that the DACS metadata elements from the previous levels are complete, and that the relationship between the current level and previous levels are clearly presented. The rest of Part I defines the metadata elements required for each level of description.

Part II Archival Authority Records

The second part of DACS is concerned with creating records that establish the context in which an archival material was created, appraised, and included in an archive. There are three steps in creating these authority records: identifying the people or organizations involved in creating the record, assembling biographical data relating to those creators, and applying a standard such as Resource Description and Access to the names so that the names can be easily referenced between institutions. These authority records can then either be incorporated into metadata of an archival records or separate authority records can be created, which are then linked with the archival materials.

Relation to Other Standards

While the first edition expanded on the basic rules for describing archival material that are found in chapter 4 of the deprecated library cataloging standard, Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2), the second edition of DACS more closely relates to AACR2's successor, Resource Description and Access (RDA). DACS serves as the US implementation of international archival descriptive standards such as ISAD(G) and the International Standard Archival Authority Record. It also provides crosswalks from DACS to MARC, Encoded Archival Description (EAD), RDA, and Encoded Archival Context (EAC-CPF). DACS specifies only the type of content, not the structural or encoding requirements or the actual verbiage to be used; it is therefore suitable for use in conjunction with structural and encoding standards, such as MARC and EAD, and with controlled vocabularies such as Medical Subject Headings, Library of Congress Subject Headings, Art & Architecture Thesaurus, and so on.