The notion of "shareable" metadata has recently emerged in the cultural heritage community as a result of increased expectations for making descriptive metadata openly available. Archivists, too, must work to create shareable metadata if archives are to remain viable in a continually evolving information environment. This paper discusses the issues involved in applying shareable metadata principles to archival description, describes strategies and tools for creating shareable archival descriptive metadata, and considers emerging trends in metadata sharing. The authors also outline further recommendations for action by the archival community. A n E v o l v i n g V i s i o n o f A r c h i v a l D e s c r i p t i o n Descriptive practices are a hot topic of discussion within the archival community. Daniel Pitti describes this current activity as a fundamental rethinking, originally motivated by technological change: "The opportunities for improving archival practices and services presented by computers and network technology have inspired archivists to engage in a new analysis of archival description." 1 This is not to say that technology on its own is responsible for recent developments in the field, but rather that technological developments have helped to motivate a new vision of what can be accomplished with more standardized archival description. Archivists have joined together to develop and revise community-based standards for finding aids to promote better discovery and delivery of archival descriptions to end users.

This case study details the evolution of descriptive practices and standards used in the Mount Holyoke College Archives and the Five College Finding Aids Access Project, discusses the relationship of Encoded Archival Description (EAD) and the MARC standard in reference to archival description, and addresses the challenges and opportunities of transferring data from one metadata standard to another. The study demonstrates that greater standardization in archival description allows archivists to respond more effectively to technological change.

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