Trusting Description: Authenticity, Accountability, and Archival Description Standards

Abstract

It has been suggested that one of the purposes of archival description is to establish grounds for presuming the authenticity of the records being described. The article examines the implications of this statement by examining the relationship between and among authenticity, archival description, and archival accountability, assessing how this relationship is made manifest in a contemporary archival description standard—the General International Standard for Archival Description—and considering the relationship between description and documentation.