Work in Church Archives, Response and Recommendations, as Outcome of the Debate about Archival Description

Abstract

In this work the author works out the new approaches to inventory-making of archival materials in Church Archives. The Church archivists, as all the others, must be trained for the necessary uniformity of standards. The so-called descriptive standards of the funds, whose general principles have been recently gathered by the International Council on Archives - Conseil International des Archives ratify some fundamental principles of archival description.
The author reports some examples of pluri-levelled representation of Church Archives, according to the scheme of the overturned tree proposed by the ISAD (International Standard Archival Description). The fist example concerns the articulation of the Archives of the Basilica of St. Nicholas at Bari; the second represents a piece belonging to the structure of funds of the Mess of the Archbishopric Archives at Pisa, the third presents a sector of the system of funds of the Diocese Archives in Padua and eventually the third one is evidence of the insertion of numerous Archives of confraternities, not to mention the one of the vestry-board, in one unified Venetian Archives , the one belonging to the parish churches of San Raffaele arcangelo and of San Nicolò dei Mendicoli, which were for a short period kept unified. This is a way to have applicable examples for numerous identical funds. As a conclusion the author reports two examples of the description of the ISAAR (International Standard Archival Authority Records).