Records in Contexts

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Records in Contexts (RiC) is a standard for the description of archive material .

history

In 2012 the International Archives Council (ICA) set up the Experts Group on Archival Description (EGAD). The body has 21 members from 13 countries.

His task is to develop a description standard based on archival principles that harmonizes the four existing standards ISAD (G) , ISAAR (CPF) , ISDF (International Standard Description of Functions) and ISDIAH (International Standard Description of Institutions with Archival Holdings), integrated and further developed.

The new standard was presented at the international ICA congress in Seoul in September 2016 and the draft of a conceptual model (RiC-CM) was published as a consultation draft . The finished standard should also include a formal ontology (RiC-O), version 0.1 of which was published in December 2019.

content

RiC-CM documents the most important entities of the archival directory and their properties.

The model is based on the tasks of archiving institutions and the methodological bases developed in this context for contextualizing the archived documents , in particular the provenance principle . While the traditional archival practice of description represents the development context to be mapped in a strictly hierarchical form, RiC based on the RDF model enables both parallel and plural relationships between individual elements and thus the representation of complex relationships.

The standard can thus be understood as an attempt to reformulate and expand the principles of archival indexing.

RiC is not only reacting to the new possibilities created by digitization , but also to a growing awareness of the historical, social and media-related nature of archiving practice.

The ontology created with the help of Web Ontology Language (OWL) is intended to enable the linkability of descriptive metadata for archival holdings with those for traditional material in other memory institutions in the sense of Linked Open Data .

criticism

A comprehensive criticism comes from InterPARES Trust, a research project on questions of digital archiving . On the one hand, the logic of the model is criticized, on the other hand, a lack of transparency in the development of the standard.

Web links

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  1. ↑ https://www.ica.org/standards/RiC/ontology
  2. ↑ Bogdan Florin Popovici: “Records in Contexts - Towards a New Level in Archival Description?”, In: Tehnični in vsebinski problemi klasičnega in elektronskega arhiviranja , Radenci 2016, p. 20ff. (PDF; 402 kB)
  3. ↑ InterPARES Trust: Comments on “Records in Context” , (December 10th, 2016). (PDF; 271 kB)