Over the last decade, the Canadian Council of Archives (CCA) has made some efforts toward updating the Canadian Rules for Archival Description (RAD), a national archival descriptive standard that it publishes and maintains. The council convened a national meeting to discuss the “future of RAD” in 2016 and supported the development of a new standard for archival accession records, published in 2019. In February 2023, CCA announced that it had recently voted to “amalgamate the RAD Committee and the Standards Committee to form a new Standards Committee.” CCA convened the first meeting of the new Standards Committee in March 2024 and supported its activities until October 2024, when the CCA Board of Directors decided to “pause this work.” We write as former members of this CCA committee. As working archivists and as archival educators, all of us have long-standing interests in standards for archival description. We were dismayed by our experience on the committee and by the lack of information or apparent action in the weeks and months since the committee was disbanded. We have written this note to describe for the wider Canadian archival community the history and status of efforts to revise or replace RAD and to make an urgent call for us to move this work forward in light of commitments that we, as a community, have already made through the Reconciliation Framework for Canadian archives. Our title contrasts two metaphors from the literature. In 1993, Kent Haworth compared the development of RAD to the European “voyages of discovery,” travelling “from the old world to the new world of information management.” Twenty years later, in 2014, Tahltan archivist and librarian Camille Callison characterized Indigenous libraries, archives, and museums as “Indigenous peoples’ new canoe,” “used to carry the language and culture to future generations.” Which is our guiding metaphor today? Should archivists continue our Eurocentric voyage of discovery? Or can archives become a distinctive feature of contemporary Indigenous and non-Indigenous societies on Turtle Island? We believe these questions can only be answered through open discussion and debate across Canadian archival communities. We hope this note stimulates that discussion. Efforts to develop the first version of RAD began in earnest with the establishment of the Canadian Working Group on Archival Descriptive Standards in 1983. The working group published its report, Toward Descriptive Standards, in 1985, and the Planning Committee on Descriptive Standards (PCDS) was created as a committee of the Bureau of Canadian Archivists to implement the report’s recommendations. Working groups were established to develop recommendations for describing different media types, and an additional working group focused on describing records at the fonds level. The first general chapters of RAD were published in 1990, while chapters on audiovisual and electronic records continued to be developed through 1996. “The mandate of the PCDS ran out at the end of the 1995/96 fiscal year,” and standards development was taken over by “its successor body,” the Canadian Committee on Archival Description (CCAD), a committee within the CCA. By the mid-1990s, interest in a common North American description standard was growing. The Toronto Accord (1999) set out principles and a framework for creating a unified North American standard, from which the Canada–US Task Force on Archival Description (CUSTARD) was established in 2001. Differences in approach and archival principles caused a breakdown of the task force, and in lieu of a shared standard, the Society of American Archivists (SAA) published Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS) while CCAD produced “RAD2,” which was circulated to the Canadian archival community but neither approved nor published. Instead, a light revision of the existing standard …
