Describing Archives in Context: Peter J Scott and the Australian ‘Series’ System

Abstract

During the 1960s Peter J Scott and colleagues at the then Commonwealth Archives Office (now National Archives of Australia) devised a new approach to archival intellectual control, which separated descriptive information about the creators of records from information about the records themselves. This paper provides an overview of the major features of Scott’s system, placing it in its historical context and exploring its impact on the development of international archival descriptive standards.