General International Standard Archival Description

ISAD(G), the General International Standard Archival Description, is an international standard approved by the International Council on Archives (ICA) for describing archival materials created by corporations, persons, and families. First released in 1994 and revised as a second edition in 2000, the standard defines a list of elements and rules for the description of archives and establishes what information should be included at different organizational levels. The framework employs a hierarchical multi-level description model beginning with broad fonds-level documentation and proceeding through increasingly detailed levels such as subfonds, series, files, and individual items.

ISAD(G) comprises 26 data elements divided into seven functional areas, with six elements designated as essential for basic archival identification and discovery. The standard operates according to four core principles: maintaining multilevel hierarchical structure, ensuring information relevance to each descriptive level, linking descriptions within the hierarchy, and avoiding unnecessary repetition of information across levels. It functions as a complementary protocol alongside related standards including ISAAR(CPF) for authority records and can be implemented within technical frameworks such as Encoded Archival Description (EAD) and Dublin Core metadata structures.