SAA - C.F.W. Coker Award for Description

Organization: Society of American Archivists

Established in 1984, this award recognizes finding aids, finding aid systems, projects that involve innovative development in archival description, or descriptive tools that enable archivists to produce effective finding aids. To merit serious consideration for the award, nominees must, in some significant way, set national standards, represent a model for archival description, or otherwise have a substantial impact on descriptive practices. The following types of works or activities may be considered: Finding aids, including, among others, multi-institutional guides, record surveys, repository guides, special subject lists, finding aids to individual collections or records groups, and narrative descriptions of holdings; Finding aid systems, including, among others, manual or automatic indexing systems, computer databases, or current awareness systems for notifying users of holdings; Descriptive tools that enable archivists to produce more effective finding aids, including, among others, subject thesauri, authority files, data element dictionaries, manuals establishing descriptive standards, and such reference works as atlases and administrative histories; Projects that involve innovative developments in archival description, including, among others, cooperative ventures that result in the exchange of finding aid information among repositories, efforts at building national information systems, and survey projects.