Archival electronic records: guidelines for compiling the New dictionary of archival terminology

Abstract

Changes introduced by electronic records management and e-goverment in the traditional methods of the archival science have caused the appearance of new Scire. 12 : 2 (jul.-dic. 2006) 151-164. ISSN 1135-3716. terms to name new concepts. These new terms have been created either by giving new meanings to already existing terminological units or by translating or assimilating terms from other linguistic systems. It seems particularly important to study the changes experienced, to evaluate the problems arising and to carry out a series of actions the final aim of which is to standardise a specialised lexical universe —that of the archival science— with the objective of serving its natural users efficiently, concisely and accurately. One key action must undoubtedly be to display the results of our study on a dictionary. This paper shows the process followed in the development of the New dictionary of archival science (DAR). A process that starts from the analysis of a corpus of sufficiently representative texts of the specialised knowledge domain of archival science. This corpus will let us obtain reliable data to show which terms are the most frequently used in these texts, which are the most representative ones in the field and which are the contexts they appear in. The working materials analysed in the following pages refer to one of the subfields of the dictionary that has already been fulfilled, the one corresponding to electronic records and e-governement.