Why description matters
An object that cannot be found has been lost, however well it is stored. Description is what makes an archive usable: it says what each object is, where it came from, what happened to it and who may see it. Most of it is dull to write and invaluable to read.
A Lazarus record, field by field
Every record in the catalog has the same fields. The first record in the archive, LZ-00001, is a good one to keep open alongside this list.
- Catalog number
- Issued in order as each restoration is finished, and never reused. Numbers run from LZ-00001, recovered in March 1994.
- Title and creator
- As the work names itself, or as its creator or donor knew it. Archivists do not invent titles; untitled works are described in brackets or plain words.
- Year
- When the work was made. Records of organizations and lives give the span of years they cover.
- Platform
- The machine or system the work was made for, which decides how it is run today.
- Recovered from
- The physical medium, or media, the work was recovered from, and how many carriers there were.
- Fidelity
- How much of the original survived. See the levels below.
- Rights
- The terms on which the work can be shown. See Rights and orphan works.
- Collection and partner archive
- Where the work belongs in the archive, and the partner that holds a copy or deposited it.
- Restored and re-catalogued
- When the restoration was finished, and when the record was last revised.
- Fixity
- The SHA-256 checksum of the recovered image, and when Vigil last confirmed it.
- Emulation profile or migration
- How the work is made usable today.
- Provenance
- Where the work came from, who held it and what was done to recover it.
- Bit-exact
- Every bit of the original was recovered, and independent reads agree. The image is indistinguishable from the medium on the day it was made.
- Complete
- All of the work was recovered. A small number of damaged sectors were rebuilt from redundant data or a second copy, and every repair is documented.
- Reconstructed
- Rebuilt from several damaged copies, none of them complete on its own. The result is whole, but no single original ever held it.
- Partial
- Some of the work could not be recovered. What survives is usable, and the gaps are recorded in a damage map kept with the record.
- Fragmentary
- Only fragments survive. They are kept because nothing else of the work does.
Provenance and custody
Provenance is the history of an object before it reached the archive; custody is its history since. Lazarus records both. Every action taken on an object, from the first read to each fixity check, is logged with the date, the person or process responsible and the result, so that anyone can see exactly what has been done to it and by whom.
Standards
Lazarus records map onto widely used standards: Dublin Core for description and PREMIS for preservation events, with the Lazarus Descriptive Standard covering platform and carrier details. The fourth edition of the Lazarus standard was adopted in 2026. Bringing every record up to it is the work now known as re-cataloguing.
Describing your own collection
- Give everything a unique number, and write it on the sleeve or box as well as in your list.
- Record where each item came from, and from whom.
- Write down what you see, not what you assume. “Label reads ‘Taxes’” is more useful than “tax records”.
- Record what you did, including what you decided not to keep.
- Keep the description with the object: a plain text file in the same folder will outlast any database.