Report from Toronto
Archival Context Meeting
March 2001
Archives, manuscript and other special collections of unique material present special challenges for those describing them and making them widely accessible. For the past several years there have been several important accomplishments in creating standards for describing these special materials and making detailed information about them more available in electronic form. One particular challenge remains and that is creating and implementing a standard way of describing information about the creators of archival materials - individuals and families, organizations and corporate bodies. Repositories of primary materials around the world hold enormous amounts of data describing people and organizations but to date there has been no standard approach to describing these in a way that will link related information and enable researchers to find the rich data that exists to support this special kind of research.
While there has been some interest in addressing this problem in several venues, the need for an international group of experts to begin concrete work on developing a standard approach to this descriptive problem was clear. Through a generous grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation to RLG specifically for organizing this meeting, a group of fourteen archivists from seven countries[1] met in Toronto, Canada, from March 3rd to 6th, 2001, to advance work on an international standard for recording and exchanging structured information about the context in which archival records[2] are created and used.
The archival profession has made major progress over the past two decades in defining standard structures for recording and exchanging descriptions of archival materials with the development of MARC-AMC for collection level catalog records and Encoded Archival Description for full text finding aids, there remains a need for a companion standard for describing the organizations, individuals, and families that created and used these materials. Archival theory and practice recognizes the close linkage between descriptions of archival materials and information about creators of those materials to support appraisal, discovery, navigation, and interpretation of those materials.
The International Council on Archives (ICA) has recognized this linkage in its adoption of the International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families - ISAAR(CPF). ISAAR(CPF), however, is neither an implementation standard nor an encoding scheme that institutions can use directly to record and exchange this contextual information.
With support from the Digital Library Federation, an international group of archivists, archival educators, and information scientists met at Yale University in December of 1998 and laid out a program for pursuing development of an encoding standard that would respond to this need. The March 2001 meeting in Toronto, made possible through the generous grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation to RLG, continued that work by articulating more precisely the principles governing such an encoding standard and by beginning the definitional work necessary to construct it.
The group prepared for the meeting by drafting and reviewing a set of principles and criteria to direct its work, by reviewing earlier work done by the Yale meeting and by a team of Mellon Research Fellows at the Bentley Historical Library in 1993, and by creating a database of elements used in various archival and other resources that recorded contextual information.
The participants spent the first part of the meeting discussing goals and desired outcomes for the meeting. The group agreed that the standard needs to address more than traditional authority control of headings and that accompanying documentation is needed to distinguish clearly between authority records and rich, contextual information.. The group also discussed the relationship of its work to the pending review of ISAAR(CPF) by the ICA’s Descriptive Standards Committee. It decided that the presence of a number of members of that committee at the Toronto meeting, the formal submission of the meeting report to the ICA as part of the review process, and the actions of individual participants in the context of the review of ISAAR(CPF) by their own national bodies was sufficient to make the ICA aware of the group’s work and findings. In addition, a similar project in the European Union, the LEAF (Linking and Exploring Authority Files) was launched in March and several of the meeting participants are associated with this effort as well, ensuring a truly international collaborative approach.
The group also recognized that archival context extended beyond persons, organizations, and families to functions, business processes, activities, geographic entities, and other entities, but that it would focus its work on those three entities as a first step.
The group reached consensus on four products that they wanted the meeting to produce:
It also identified four areas where further work would be necessary following the meeting - technical development, content development, communication with the archival community, and coordination of the various aspects of the work, and agreed to return to them at the end of the meeting.
The group then discussed the draft principles that would inform the creation of the standard. Modifications to the draft principles were agreed to, including the addition of a preamble that would recognize the archival perspective that informs this work.[3]
Wendy Duff presented her analysis of the information contained in the element database. As noted above, the database recorded data elements used in contextual information systems and matched them where possible to elements in ISAAR. Among her findings were that there was significant confusion about the ISAAR elements and what they mean. The group discussed further the various types of name and their construction and the need for consistency with traditional library authority control structures. It also discussed the thorny issue of when an entity becomes a new entity, noting that in authority control systems a change of name triggers the need for a new record, but decided that how new entities were triggered was an implementation issue that did not affect the encoding structure but should be addressed in subsequent guidelines. The issue of moment-in-time information (e.g., in a yearbook of organizations) vs. comprehensive historical description was also recognized, especially as it affects the import of contextual information from existing sources. Finally, the trade-offs between tightly structured and granular data elements and narrative descriptions was noted and the group agreed that the standard should be able to accommodate both.
Participants then began identifying data areas and elements within them. Five major areas were identified:
Much of the remainder of the meeting was spent fleshing out and discussing the elements needed in each area. The group paid particular attention to the identity and description areas on the assumption that information in the other areas was relatively straightforward and could be dealt with following the meeting. The group did, however, discuss the nature of the relationships that might exist among entities and defined a limited set of relationship types for further investigation.
In the description area, the group first treated each type of entity (corporate body, person, and family) separately and identified elements specific to that type, drawing from ISAAR, elements in the database, and other sources. It then rationalized those elements into subareas, where appropriate, and drafted a preliminary list of elements for each entity type.
On the last afternoon of the meeting, the group turned to the issue of how to continue the work it had begun. Four areas were identified as essential to concluding the work of the meeting:
The group also discussed steps that needed to be taken beyond those directly related to the meeting to ensure that the initiative would continue to pursue the creation and adoption of the standard. The steps identified included:
As part of this discussion, the group agreed that it would transform itself into an ongoing working group, adding new members as needed and seeking funding as needed for its work. Yale University agreed to serve as the interim maintenance agency and to host the initiative’s web site, listservs, and other communication and dissemination vehicles.
Finally, the group turned to the issue of names for the initiative and its products. It was agreed that the standard would use the working title of “Encoded Archival Context” (EAC) and that the statement of principles would be titled the “Toronto Tenets” (following the model of the “Ann Arbor Accords” for the principles underlying the Encoded Archival Description standard).
Report from Toronto
Archival Context Meeting
March 2001
Appendix A
List of participants
Tone Merete Bruvik. University of Bergen. Norway.
Adrian Cunningham. National Archives of Australia.
Wendy Duff. University of Toronto. Faculty of Information Studies.
Bob Krawczyk. Archives of Ontario.
Michelle Light. Manuscripts and Archives. Yale University.
Gavan McCarthy. Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre.
Per-Gunnar Ottosson. Riksarkivet, Stockholm, Sweden.
Daniel Pitti.
Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. University of Virginia.
Kathleen Roe. New York State Archives.
Dick Sargent. Historical Manuscripts Commission. Great Britain.
Richard Szary. Manuscripts and Archives. Yale University.
Anne Van Camp. Research Libraries Group.
Stefano Vitali. Archivio di Stato di Firenze. Italy.
Stephen Yearl. Manuscripts and Archives. Yale University.
Report from Toronto
Archival Context Meeting
March 2001
Appendix B
Statement of principles: the Toronto Tenets
Toronto
Tenets: Principles and Criteria for a
Model for Archival Context Information
This document defines principles and criteria for designing, developing, and maintaining a representational scheme and communication structure for archival context information.
A description of archival records sufficient to support the accurate interpretation of the records must include a description of the circumstances that surrounded their creation and use. Primary among these circumstances is a recording of information about the creative responsibility for the records, usually vested in an organization or person(s). With this information, users can understand the records more completely since they will know the context within which the organization or person operated and created records.
This model primarily addresses the description of creating entities, a central component to the description of archival records, and clearly an archival responsibility. It recognizes the existence of other information, such as functions and business processes, geographic places, events, concepts, and topics, that are crucial to archival description, which are also important, but which may be defined more fully by other agencies and not included in this model.
While traditional heading control functions may be accommodated by this model, its primary purpose is to standardize descriptions about records creators so that they can be discovered and displayed in an electronic environment, linked to each other to show/discover the relationships amongst record-creating entities, and linked to descriptions of records.
Definitions and Uses
1. Archival context information consists of information describing the circumstances under which records (defined broadly here to include personal papers and records of organizations) have been created and used. This context includes the identification and characteristics of the persons, organizations, and families who have been the creators, users, or subjects of records, as well as the relationships amongst them.
2. Context information is not metadata that describes other information resources, but information that describes entities that are part of the environment in which information resources (i.e., records) have existed.
3. The recording of context information in archival information systems directly supports a more complete description and understanding of records as well as the provenance approach to retrieval of these records across time and domains.
4. Context information also can have value as an independent information resource, separate from its use in supporting the description, retrieval, and interpretation of records.
5. This model is also intended to support the exchange and sharing of context information, especially in those instances where repositories have holdings or interests that have context information in common, especially about creators or subjects of records.
Structure and Content
6. Context information has traditionally been embedded in catalog records, finding aids, and other archival descriptive tools. This model can be used either as a component of existing descriptive approaches that fully integrate contextual information into descriptive products or as an independent system that is linked to descriptive systems and products.
7. Each instance of context information describes a single entity.
8. The model provides a framework within which the full range and depth of context information can be recorded and suggests a minimum set of elements for describing an entity, but defers recommendations for appropriate use of other elements to application guidelines developed for specific implementations.
9. The model defines a universe of elements used to describe entities and the structure of interrelationships amongst those elements. These elements and structure support the discovery, navigation, and presentation of context information and the linking of that information to descriptions of records, especially those encoded according to EAD, MARC, and similar standards.
10. The model supports the linking of descriptions of contextual entities to digital or other surrogate representations of those entities.
Technical Issues
11. The model is expressed as an XML-compliant document type definition to encourage platform independence and portability of information. The model may also be implemented using other approaches.
Components, Relationship to ISAAR(CPF), and Ownership
12. Two parts: dtd and guidelines.
13. The model was designed as an implementation of the International Standard for Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families -ISAAR(CPF). ISAAR(CPF) was under review at the time the model was being developed and the model may incorporate different approaches than that defined in the original ISAAR(CPF) standard. Principles and approaches adopted for the model will be submitted to the International Council on Archives Committee on Descriptive Standards to inform their review of ISAAR(CPF). It is expected that the model will fully conform to the revised ISAAR(CPF).
14. Responsibility for control and maintenance will be carried out by Yale for some period of time and the original working group will continue to develop the model until it is appropriate to be opened to a wider community for further discussion and verification and testing.