Archival Finding Aids in Linked Open Data between description and interpretation

The Historian and Archival Finding Aids

Finding Commonalities in Linked Open Data

The availability of a data source as huge, open, accessible and machine–understandable as the Web of Data asks for new and sophisticated inferences to be implemented in order to deeply exploit such a rich informative content. Towards this direction, the paper proposes an approach for inferring clusters in collections of RDF resources on the basis of the features shared by their descriptions. Th...

Access to Archival Finding Aids: Context Matters

We detail the design of a search engine for archival finding aids based on an XML database system. The resulting system shows results—which can vary in granularity from individual archival items to the whole fonds—within the context of the archive. The presentation preserves the archival structure by providing important contextual information, and all individual results can be “clicked”, warpin...

Searching Archival Finding Aids: Retrieval in Original Order?

Archival principles as Provenance (keeping material from the same creator together) and its corollary Original Order (keeping the order of creation intact) could help improve access to the archival materials. We investigate the importance of relevance ranking and ‘Original Order’ when searching finding aids in EAD using XML Retrieval. Our experiment shows that relevance ranking is of paramount ...

Encoded Archival Description: Data Quality and Analysis

In order to authenticate the meaning of collections and to preserve their evidentiary value, archivists create documents (finding aids) that describe the provenance and original order of the records (MacNeil, 1995). Metadata standards such as Encoded Archival Description (EAD) enable finding aids to be encoded, searched, and displayed online. However, recent research has begun to draw attention...