For this month resource of the month, we wanted to highlight a video created by EGAD (Expert Group on Archival Description) that introduces Records in Contexts.
We have written a brief summary of this resource giving you an idea of its content as well as the reason why it was chosen.
Resource Summary
Why we have selected it?
At the recent Rome Conference, there was a presentation of the latest version, 0.2, of Records in Contexts (RiC) standard. RiC is still a draft, but it is anticipated that RiC version 1.0 will be launched for operational use by archives by the end of this year or by the beginning of 2023. The intention in highlighting it now is to familiarise people with the standard’s origins, purpose, concepts and functioning in preparation for this launch. Another reason for highlighting it online as the Resource of the Month is to encourage wide-viewing of this video for those who were unable to attend the #ICARoma2022 in person.
What will you find in this resource?
The video presents different aspects of RiC, from its conception in 2016 until the present.
The standard has been authored by ICA’s Expert Group on Archival Description (EGAD), which, at the moment, has 21 members from 14 countries. Version 0.1 was released in 2016, after which feedback was gathered from the international archival community. This was followed by substantial revisions, and by the current version, 0.2, that was released in 2021. Version 0.2 is still a draft but is mature enough to use in projects. Following this release, a second call for comments took place and the comments received in early 2022 are being analyzed and will be taken into account to develop RiC 1.0. RiC 1.0 will be an official ICA recommendation; it will be launched by the end of 2022 or the beginning of 2023.
RiC emerges from existing standards for archival description, especially ISAD-(G), ISAAR-CPR and ISDF, but seeks to overcome certain limitations associated with these standards. These limitations include: a lack of coherence given that they all emerged from separate process; being technologically and intellectually outdated; their lack of uptake (except for ISAD(G)) by archival institutions and software providers; and not being based on rigorously controlled and identified entities, thus leaving too much room for interpretation.
Responding to new technological developments (especially around Linked Data and semantic technologies, and methods for modeling a domain of knowledge as a graph of linked entities), interoperability is at the heart of RiC. RiC takes the existing standards as its fundamental point of departure, while updating them and integrating them into a coherent whole. The standard will allow an easier linking between, and alignment of, descriptive data from archives, libraries and museums, than is currently possible. It will also be possible to use RiC in combination with the PREMIS data dictionary that concerns preservation metadata for digital resources.
RiC consists of four components:
RiC-IAD (Introduction to Archival Description), which contextualises RiC in the history of ICA’s developing of standards for archival description
RiC-CM (Conceptual Model): a high-level conceptual level for intellectually describing records.
RIi-O (Ontology): a technical implementation of RiC-CM in Web Ontology Language, which enables to produce archival description as Linked Data, in the form of RDF datasets. Just as RiC-CM is for now only available in English, it is documented in English only for now, but its documentation will also in the future be documented in Spanish and French, and the intention is to also develop international vocabularies over time.
RiC-AG (Application Guidelines): Will provide a roadmap for using RiC. It will be released in 2023.
The video is in three parts.
The first part is provided by Tobias Wildi, University of the Applied Sciences of the Grisons (Switzerland), and member of Expert Group. He introduces RiC’s origins, purpose, general design principles and current status. The second part is offered by Bill Stockting, Manager of Royal Archives (UK) who explains the second component of RiC- RiC-CM (Conceptual Model). The third part is given by Florence Clavaud, Head of the Lab, Archives Nationales of France, and Executive Member of EGAD, who presents RiC-O (Ontology), using real life examples of its potential use.
RiC is more complex than the existing standards for archival description, and more rigorously internally coherent. At the same time, it allows for continued usage of the existing standards, but from a higher level of abstraction. Its use will allow a description that more accurately and completely reflects the very concrete nature of records and the historical specificity of the material processes that produced them. It will greatly expand the ability to understand archival wholes, and to understand how the whole relates to the parts, and vice versa. This will be possible both within a given archival fonds, within an archival institution, within the wider information landscape, and within society itself on a global level. The standard makes it possible to describe archives in a more precise and nuanced way and to represent the variety of relationships that bind them to their contexts. It is a very rich standard which, importantly, has already evolved and will continue to evolve over time based on the needs and feedback of its users.
The presentations in the video didactically explain why such high-levels of abstraction are necessary, and what this means in practice. It is an intellectually dense and contents-packed highly informative resource. It can be consulted and reconsulted and will also be invaluable when archival institutions actually come to using RiC in their cataloguing once version 1.0 is launched later. It will also be a useful resource in assisting archival institutions to decide whether or not to use RiC.
Discover the resource by clicking here