Summary

Members of the Experts Group on Archival Description (EGAD) Daniel Pitti, Gavan McCarthy and Bogdan-Floriin Popovici ran a public conference panel session at the ALA-ICA Conference in Mexico City, 27-29 November 2017. This session focussed on the history and activities of EGAD, and provided an overview of the Records in Context-Contextual Model and the Records in Context-Ontology.

Details

Abstract for the Panel Session

The International Council on Archives (ICA) Expert Group on Archival Description (EGAD) is developing a new standard for the description of archival materials: Records in Contexts (RiC). The standard has two parts: a conceptual model (RiC-CM) and an ontology (RiC-O). In its work the EGAD is building on more than twenty years of successful standards development by the ICA, as well as national or project-based modelling work in the archival community alongside that of allied professional communities. The EGAD is also informed by established and emerging communication technologies, particularly semantic technologies that are more expressive than the more established markup and database technologies, and are increasingly used to interconnect description in disparate descriptive systems to provide integrated access to resources across cultural heritage domains.

The four existing ICA standards (ISAD(G), ISAAR, ISDF, and ISDIAH) are intended to work in relation to one another to form a complete model for archival description. They were developed in succession over a twenty-year period, by different experts with new and emerging understandings of archival description, and against a backdrop of rapidly developing communication technologies that offered an expanding range of opportunities as well as the challenge of electronic records. It is thus no surprise that the standards are not consistent and complete in describing how they are to be used together.

It is within this context that the EGAD is developing RiC, reconciling and integrating the four existing standards, reorienting them to take advantage of developments in communication technologies, and recognizing that the challenge of describing and managing electronic records requires that archival description be more closely aligned with the management of records in their context of origin and use, while at the same time accommodating traditional archival materials and the existing predominant method of archival description, fonds-based multilevel description.

The members of EGAD reflect a wide variety of cultural perspectives and theoretical understandings. While representing diverse viewpoints, all members of the EGAD are committed to developing a descriptive standard that reflects a broad consensus, and that is accommodating to multiple perspectives.

RiC-CM will resemble the existing four standards, defining the major archival descriptive entities and their properties, and the interrelations among them. RiC-O will be expressed as a W3C OWL (Ontology Web Language), and will have as its primary focus enabling archival description to be expressed in semantic technologies.

In this presentation, three members of the EGAD will provide background and an overview of both RiC-CM and RiC-O.

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