Publication: Metodologia de Avaliação de Aplicações para Descrição de Arquivo Definitivo

Abstract

The present dissertation by Sérgio Manuel Duarte Simões is oriented to the need of knowledge from Archivists in order to evaluate Software for archival description. When this task is allocated it is usual to be done by computer experts without any competence on such subject and there is some difficulty to establish a bridge between people with different expertise.
For such reason it is done a deep approach to standards either from archives world or Software quality. International Council for Archives (ICA) has done a great effort in order to publish standards for archival description mainly oriented for computerization needs and now such rules are publicly available: ISAD (G); ISAAR (CPF); ISDF; e ISDIAH.
Meanwhile a large community oriented for quality management has done important efforts, after the publication of ISO 9000, in order to spread to all business activities such concepts. ISO/IEC 9126 is the main standard for Software engineering which latter was integrated on a more extensive work known as SQuaRE (Softwareproduct Quality Requirements and Evaluation), originating the ISO/IEC25000.
Evaluation of Software oriented for archival description can not be done forgetting future trends where Open and Free Software began a new approach as a business model and when there are already some interesting solutions. In order to cope with such reality we introduce some concepts to understand this market.
The complexity of standards and technology framework has inspired a methodology proposal for non experts, mainly Archivists, when they need to participate on Software evaluation teams with Computer technicians. Such methodology that we have denominated Simplified does not lose completeness and accuracy but, is oriented for easy steps as will be demonstrated through analysis of Software freely available (Archon, Arqbase, Digitarq e ICA-AtoM).

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