Standards Portal

SAA's Standards Portal is designed to educate the archives community about the value and role of standards, enhance the application of standards to practice, and facilitate successful partnerships with related information standards organizations with mutual concerns and interests. The portal includes SAA-approved standards, guidelines, and best practice documents. The Society's long-term goal is to establish a comprehensive clearinghouse that includes contextual information to assist archivists and allied professionals in moving these, and other external standards, from theory into practice.

Administration and Management

Appraisal and Acquisition

  • Establishes a step-by-step approach to reappraisal and deaccessioning in archival repositories and outlines general steps, problems, and solutions yielding responsible and ethical reappraisal and deaccessioning decisions. 

Arrangement and Description

Digitization

Education

  • The Guidelines for a Graduate Program in Archival Studies serve as a benchmark against which graduate programs in archival studies may be measured. These guidelines establish minimum standards for archival education programs in terms of mission, curriculum, faculty, and infrastructure.

  • The purpose of these guidelines, developed for individuals and organizations that provide or sponsor archival continuing education, is to encourage the creation of opportunities for lifelong learning within the archival community.

Ethics, Values, and Legal Affairs

  • Describes what professional archivists consider to be best practices regarding reasonable efforts to identify and locate rights holders. "Orphan works" is a term used to describe the situation in which the owner of a copyrighted work cannot be identified and located by someone who wishes to make use of the work in a manner that requires permission of the copyright owner.

  • Browse External Ethics, Values, and Legal Affairs Standards

Outreach and Exhibitions

Preservation

Records and Information Management

Reference and Access