The National Descriptive Standard for Archives was approved and issued by the State Bureau of Technical Standards on 10 May 1985. Its register number is GB 3792.5-85.

The Descriptive Standard for Archives was the first national archival standard ever appeared in China. In January 1985, a national conference attended by the directors of supervision divisions of provincial, autonomous regional and municipal archives was sponsored by the State Archives Bureau of China, recommending all provincial archives to start pilot implementation.

Since 1986, all provinces, autonomous regions and cities in China began to study and implement the standard. For example, Jun County Archives of Henan province used one year to describe all the important archives in its custody and to input the descriptions into computers, which helped to automate archival retrieval to some extent. For another example, the Archives of Hebei province made 170,000 descriptions of its historical archives in three years and input them into computers. They also output the descriptions in card form according to the standard. The cards were distributed province wide, which formed an standard catalogue center of both manual and automated retrieval systems, and helped facilitate better communication among archives.

In practice, we have found that the standard had many drawbacks and needed to be more specific in some aspects, since different archives has its special collections and serves different users. For instance, the First Historical Archives for the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the Second Historical Archives for the Republic period and the specialized archives in the fields of metallurgy, seas and oceans, meteorology, space technology, and medicine etc. have developed their own detailed rules in conformity with the basic principle of the standard. The staff in these departments were very well trained on how to make descriptions, which guaranteed the smooth implementation of the descriptive standard.

A survey conducted by the State Archives Bureau of China in 1990 and 1995 on national archival descriptive practices showed that the Descriptive Standard for Archives of the 1985 version was basically applicable and practicable, though improvements needed to be made.

Archival description is the precondition of automation of archives management. For instance the Central Archives of China has completed and input 400,000 descriptions, creating the biggest documentary data base. This data base cannot only help to speed up retrieval, improve retrieval accuracy, but can also be grouped in hundreds of catalogues of ten different kinds, such as fond, classification, subject, creator, institution, region, and years so as to meet the demand of different users. Similarly, the Shenyang City Archives and the Archives of Commission of Science Technology and Industry for National Defense have realized archival modernization on the basis of better archival description.

We started to revise the Descriptive Standard in 1995. We intended to address problems occurred in practice, to adjust, amend and change some of the descriptive elements that do not conform with practice, to make the general rules more specific and applicable. The revised version of the standard not only carries on what is good in the old version, but also will be more applicable in practice.

The Standard and Policy Department of the State Archives Bureau of China is planning to summarize the national experience of archival descriptive practices, and to work out a program for future implementation of the standard. We believe standardization is the foundation of archival modernization.