Metadata sessions at RDA P8 in Denver

Hi Rebecca

Further to our conversation to day,  said I would upload details of the Expert Working Group of the INternational Council for Archives:

RECORDS IN CONTEXTS A CONCEPTUAL MODEL FOR ARCHIVAL DESCRIPTION (2016) see  http://www.ica.org/sites/default/files/RiC-CM-0.1.pdf

For the background discussion paper (2013) - see - http://www.ica.org/sites/default/files/EGAD_English.pdf

Some quotes about the records management standards that have been considered in the 2016 consultation release here is a quote from the 2013 paper.

Archival Community Conceptual Models While development of an international archival conceptual model is just beginning, the EGAD’s work will be greatly facilitated by one binational and two national modeling initiatives. Of the three initiatives, the most long-standing of the models is represented by the closely aligned Australian Government Recordkeeping Metadata Standard Version 2.0 (2008) (AGRkMS) and the Archives New Zealand’s Technical Specifications for the Electronic Recordkeeping Metadata Standard Version 1.0 (2008).26 Both are based on thorough revisions of the Australian Recordkeeping Metadata Standard for Commonwealth Agencies Version 1.0 published in 1999.27 In Spain, the Comisión de Normas Españolas de Descripción Archivística (CNEDA) began work in 2007 and published the Modelo Conceptual de Descripción Archivística y Requisitos de Datos Básicos de las Descripciones de Documentos de Archivo, Agentes y Funciones in 2012. 28 Recently, in Finland, the Arkistolaitos (National Archives) appointed a working group to develop a conceptual model, and the working group released Draft Version 0.1 of the Finnish Conceptual Model for Archival Description. 29 Also worthy of mention are efforts in the United Kingdom to develop an ontology based on the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) communication standard (LOCAH)30 and work on the ICA-sponsored AtoM system that is developing a platform supporting the ICA descriptive standards and that enables LOD exposure of the data in compliance with existing ontologies.

The AGRkMS is grounded in two ISO standards, the Australian Standard on Records Management (AS ISO 15489) and the Metadata for Records (AS ISO 23081) and the work of the Monash University SPIRT Research Team. The standard fully embraces a “multiple-entity” model of archival description, distinguished from the “single-entity” approach to archival description that has represented and continues to represent the most common approach to archival description. The multiple-entity approach separates and interrelates the major entities that comprise the single-entity approach. The model identifies five entities: Record, Agent, Business, Mandate, and Relationship. The Relationship entity plays the role of interrelating the other four entities to form a complete description. Relationship is event based, which is to say that relations document specific human activities or events. While the developers of the standard clearly encourage the separation of the entities, they carefully describe how the standard can be used in singleentity systems where the single entity is the record and the other entities are treated as attributes of the record, and other systems that only partially separate the entities, such as record and agent.

We in Australia have developed a knowledge space and collections mapping application based on this conceptual framework. Our approach has been to pilot a tool at the moment with commitments to two standards (AGLS - which is a derivative of DC which we use to describe collections and resources and ISAAR-CPF and its XML expression EAC - CPF which provides an opportunity to create many to many relationships between entity types, entities, collections and  resources).

There is also a metadata registry built into our application which means in principle the back end is fully  extensible for integrating other standards as required. It also has teh ability to integrate local metadata expressions if required. 

At this stage, we are at the  early stages of piloting a number of use cases based only  on two standards. We see thie need to integrate these services with good practice standards arouond repository management including commitments to  PIDs etc.  We hope RDA might provide some guidance about these latter matters at some stage in the future. 

I hope this is a helpful contribution to the discussion and direction of your group. Happy  to discuss any of this if required. 

Richard Vines

(Melbourne Australia)