Both arrangement and description are core elements of archival management. The task of archival management consists of processing physical archives and making descriptions of their intellectual contents, for the purpose of facilitating easy and convenient access to information. DACS, LCDRG, and RAD are the three most prevailing archival description standards applied in North America, which have produced significant impact on archival institutions across the region. This paper attempts to compare the differences among these three archival description standards from the following five aspects: institutions in charge of the respective formulation and application of the standards, their respective conceptual principles of archival description, their respective structures of description standard, the specific description elements that compose the different standards, and their individual constitution and coding of the description elements