Difference between Archives and Libraries
Archives share with libraries the responsibility to remember on behalf of others. Archives differ from libraries in the nature of the things remembered. Libraries collect individual published books and serials, or bounded sets of individual items. The books and journals libraries collect are not unique, at least not in ways that are of general interest. Multiple copies of one publication exist, and any given copy will generally satisfy as well as any other copy. The materials in archives and manuscript libraries are the unique records of corporate bodies and the papers of individuals and families. In contrast to the published items collected by libraries, the identifiable object of interest in the archive is a complex body of interrelated, unique materials.
Difference Between Archival Description and Bibliographic Description
The distinction between what and for whom libraries and archives remember accounts for the major differences in archival and bibliographic description. A bibliographic description, such as that found in a MARC record, represents an individual published item, and thus is item-level. There is a one-to-one correspondence between the description and the item. The description is based on, and is derived from, the physical item. Archival description represents a fonds, a complex body of materials, frequently in more than one form or medium, sharing a common provenance. The description involves a complex hierarchical and progressive analysis. It begins by describing the whole, then proceeds to identify and describe sub-components of the whole, and sub-components of sub-components, and so on. Frequently, but by no means always, the description terminates with a description of individual items. The description emphasizes the intellectual structure and content of the material, rather than their physical characteristics.