Name: Nur Amira Hanis Bt Jawahir

Student Id : 2016253426

Class: IM2465B

Title: Excavating archival description: from collection to data level

All records can be ideally described individual items by creating searchable online
catalogs and there is institutions such as libraries, archives and museums that need to play the
important role for each of their materials collections. Archives must describe whole alongside
all of the individual collection materials that will be retrieved by researcher in the future,
meanwhile museums and libraries should describe their collection at the item level. Item-level
description should be increasingly used for retrieval purpose because scientist in natural history
museums are expecting more description that could be done by archives. This opinion must
take an action by Natural sciences archivist to paramount the collections to support scientists
research in future.

There are some challenges with natural sciences field documentation that need to be
discuss the project by three institutions which is University of California, Berkeley, Museum
of Vertebrate Zoology, American Museum of Natural History, and Smithsonian Institution. In
addition, there are many types of description level which is collection description that are
important to field notes and those description are created by archives. Secondly, creator
description which is important to access points and context for field research. Thirdly, item or
folder-level description that are mainly purposing to supports searchability the records and
collections received by other museums and libraries. Next, page-level description which is the
collections might be includes page content, pagination and also can include item-level
description such as title and creator. Data-level description are one of the most using in
development and natural sciences institutions are giving some opinions to include data in field
notes.

The smallest collections among those three institutions which is contains 1825 field
books are collected by The Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) because this institution
provided field notes that are using by the faculty and students as references to get the
information. Meanwhile, The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) collected 3500
field books because those collection can support the specimen collections that specimen gifts
and purchases are created by the staff for donating to the institutions. Last but not least,
Smithsonian Institution have the largest collections among the three institutions which is 8,600
field books that have been managed historically by the natural sciences departments or the
Smithsonian Institution Archives.

As a conclusion, the context of their collection is managed to described the field notes
and also as individual bibliographic records. All of the institutions begin with finding aids or
item-level records to do the description of the collection materials. The three institutions create
all the levels of description and the field notes are most often deposited in archives.