The Fifth Australian World Wide Web Conference, Ballina, NSW 17-20 April 1999

Extended Abstract - Draft date: 25 November 1998

Name of author(s):

Gavan McCarthy

Title of paper:

Engineering Utility: A visionary role for encoded archival authority information in managing virtual and physical resources.

Email of corresponding author:

gavan@asap.unimelb.edu.au

Keywords:

Authority Records; Metadata; World Wide Web; Archives; Heritage; Knowledge management; Records.

Introduction

Australia is currently placed in a unique position to capitalise on the confluence of the research, development and implementation of a variety of information-based industries. The heritage industry, including the archives, museum and built heritage sectors, the computer and information technology industries, and the multi-media learning technologies industries are all involved in significant and indeed revolutionary change at the present time. New visions for the future flourish and metadata is all the rage but the issues of the documentation, preservation and management of context in a complex communication network such as the World Wide Web remain problematic. However, within the heritage industry a new understanding is emerging that will enable the systematic, structured and distributed management of context to radically improve the management of virtual and physical resources both across space and through time.

The encoding of (archival) authority information for Web functionality based on the documentation metadata standard promulgated by the International Council on Archives [ISAAR(CPF)] which when coupled with applications of Extensible Markup Language (XML) such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) developed under the auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provides a means by which we can reach a new level of utility. It is a new level that will only be achieved through conscious and deliberate engineering based on collaborative research, development and implementation projects that will lead to common conventions of semantics, syntax and structure.
 

The Heritage Industry

The archives industry in Australia, through Peter Scott and Australian Archives in the 1960s and 1970s developed what has become known as the series system for documenting and managing archival records. The principle element of this development was that it separated the documentation of creator (provenance) from the documentation of records and recordkeeping systems. It provided a new means by which records could be effectively managed through time while still preserving the context of their creation, their relationships to other records both contemporaneous and previous, and also provided the means to relate them to records yet to be created. The issue that drove this initiative was the systematic and structural problems faced by Australian Archives through the constant change in the administrative structures of government.

Archival research in the 1990s has refined this understanding by defining the key role of the archival process through the whole records / information continuum that links the past to the present and builds bridges into the future. The archival profession world wide has been grappling with the documentation of context to preserve meaning, authority and integrity of records and information sources for many decades and has developed a keen understanding of what is required to enable this to be achieved. However, the uptake of new information technologies, particularly web technologies, in the profession has been uneven and its implications and potential for the future is only now beginning to be understood.

The development of the series system in Australia led to a position where most Australian archivists take it for granted that you separate documentation and management of provenance from the records. However, this has not been the case in related information professions and indeed in most of the archival world where systems of documentation evolved that embedded provenance within records description. This, quite naturally, led to systematic problems that have been the foundation of international professional discourse over recent decades Interestingly, in late 1998 the USA National Archives and Records Administration took the decision to adopt the Australian series system to document and manage USA government records. This is an extraordinary development.

Despite the exciting conceptual foundation provided by the series system and its potential for use on the Web to revolutionise the documentation and management of records and related information objects, much of the research effort has been focused on the description and management of records per se in networked environments with particular emphasis on the definition of metadata elements to enable the encapsulation of information objects and their preservation as records. In the USA, Daniel Pitti headed an important initiative that lead to the formulation of a Document Type Definition (DTD) in SGML for Encoded Archival Description (EAD). An important and necessary development, but primarily focused on the records and not on the documentation, management and utilisation of context.

A notable local exception to this trend was the development by the Australian Science Archives Project of the Register of the Archives of Science in Australia from 1987 and its transformation in 1994-5 into Bright Sparcs, a Web resource of international stature. The structure of Bright Sparcs pre-empted the ICA Standard [ISAAR(CPF)] and, following four years of Web implementation, is in a unique position to act as a major development site to rigorously explore the bringing together of "semantics, syntax and structure" as a fully functional reference implementation. Within the history and heritage of Australian science, technology and medicine, the Bright Sparcs (individuals) and the proposed Science in Action (societies, organisations, corporations) sites endeavour to document and cross-reference (through the use of relationship entities which can map to online and offline entities):

• Primary source creators (authority entities);
• Primary source records and objects;
• Primary source managers (archives, museums, libraries but also including individuals and organisations managing contemporary primary sources);
• Secondary source creators (authority entities);
• Secondary source objects (publications); and
• Secondary source managers (as for primary source managers).

In other sectors of the heritage industry online and offline documentation and information developments have focused heavily on the objects themselves and the provision of directories to custodial institutions. The documentation of context, in particular provenance, as a separate but related entity has not figured highly in museology in recent times. However, at a recent UNESCO Forum on University and Heritage it was noted on a number of occasions that museum documentation regimes were not capturing the human stories behind the objects they were collecting. Sufficient context, meaning and knowledge were neither being collected nor preserved. Part of problem related to the fact that the documentation, registration and management regimes did not facilitate this function. The authority record concept was proposed as a means by which this issue may be addressed.

Work on the use of shared museum object classification systems on the Web using XML has been examined recently by Alain Michard and Giang Pham-Dac. Their study revealed that the mechanisms necessary to implement such a system parallel that required to implement a Web-based network of authority record hosts. Of particular interest is the identified need to create defined relationship entities that enable the mapping of authority entities to other information objects or physical objects and also to other related authority entities.
 

The New Haven Initiative

The importance of provenance has been identified for sometime in the international arena by leading thinkers and some of these have played critical roles in the creation of ISAAR(CPF) and are now leading the development of an international collaborative research project to be placed before the USA National Science Foundation’s International Digital Libraries Funding Program. An inaugural planning committee comprising three people from Europe, nine from the USA, one from Canada and one from Australia (the author) met in Yale, New Haven on 4-6 December 1998 to formulate the scope of the project over the next 3-5 years. Funding from the National Science Foundation will only fund the USA component of the project with other participating countries expected to fund their involvement.

The issues to be considered include:

• Examination of the ICA ISAAR(CPF) standard for its suitability for full Web implementation and the recommendation for extensions to the standard to enable such;
• The structure and function of relationship entities and the definition of a standard structure and guidelines for use (particularly the relationship with the ICA ISAD(G) standard);
• The use of the authority information concept to be applied across the heritage and library industries;
• The recursive structuring of the encoded authority information concept (similar to that proposed in the RDF) to enable context management and knowledge mapping at all levels of implementation;
• The development of a reference implementation to facilitate collaborative development;
• The role of assessment and accreditation of authority information hosts.
• The roles of the participants in the project.

Australia has a unique opportunity to take a leading role given the conceptual advantage we currently hold. Although we have a major opportunity to transform our testbed software and management tools into products for the world-wide market, what is more important is that we have the opportunity to develop and implement national and global context registration and mapping that will facilitate the publishing and sharing of knowledge by all who wish to engage with the World Wide Web.