This chapter is an attempt to analyse which technological elements and which description and indexing elements directly impact information retrieval of documents. As a result of the analysis, some requirements are proposed that must be observed in archival information systems installed in organisations with the aim of optimising effective information retrieval.
TopSeeing the effectiveness achieved by libraries in information retrieval, one of the solutions proposed in the sphere of archives is the normalisation of the description. In this sense, as far back as 1985, the AMC format was proposed, as a part of the MARC format, for describing hand-written documentation deposited in libraries (Sahli, N., 1985). In the 1990s, the archival community was developing its own standards for description and control of its assets (Jimerson, R.C., 2002). Thus EAD was born, based on XML tags (Pitti, Daniel V., 1997), and ISAD (G), created by the International Council of Archives, 2000). Their aim was to describe documents in an individual way and also to be able to describe series or other types of document groupings. Later, the EAC-CPF (Society of American Archivist, 2008) and the ISAAR (CPF) (International Council of Archives, 2004) were created to describe the producers of these documents: organisations, individuals or families.
The standardisation effort for archival descriptions was accompanied by technological advances. The improvements in communications implemented since the 1990s, fundamentally the Internet and Intranet, technological advances, computers with more storage capacity and processor speed and progress made in software are indispensable for and inseparable from archival description standards when implementing a system for document management.