Karsten Kühnel: The Role of Functional Provenance between Archival Appraisal and Description — do we need an EAC–F standard?

Abstract:

The ICA metatdata model for archival description is divided into four main entities as are records, creators, functions and repositories. Although it is common opinion that these entities are interconnected closely by different kinds of relationships, and although the ICA came up to them with four descriptive standards, up to now, machine–readable standards can be found only for three of these entities. Records, creators and repositories can be described on XML basis by EAD, EAC–CPF and EAG. Functions, however, still lack in an appropriate pendant, which could become represented in an EAC library for describing functions. If functions assigned to an entity would be seen as reasons for why an entity starts operating, then functions could be considered as sources of provenance. Functions as basis for the definition of fonds and for a methodology of archival description would be marginalized in the context of a digital finding aid system, if there would not be adequate tools for describing them. Thus, archivists should take into account to foster establishing an EAC–F standard.

Grace Toland: The Irish Traditional Music Archive & The Inishowen Song Project

Abstract:

In 2008 the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA) began publishing digitised materials on its website. Digitisation and web publishing provide the archive with a means of giving world wide access to a selection of its extensive sound, print, video, still image & manuscript collections. To-date the ITMA Digital Library contains 3,839 digital items – sound, print, images, videos & interactive music scores - with accompanying metadata, PDFs (where possible) and brief contextual essays. ITMA's digital metadata is harvested regularly by Europeana and made available via the europeana.eu portal. In 2011, a local Donegal development organisation, the Inishowen Traditional Singers' Circle (ITSC) approached ITMA with a proposal to use its Digital Library to host local audio & video field recordings of traditional singers and accompanying material. With Leader funding The Inishowen Song Project (ISP) was completed in March 2013. The ISP microsite now gives free searchable access to 524 audio recordings, 75 videos; images/info on 157 singers and downloadable PDFs of 599 songs.

The following text gives an overview of ITMA's Digital Library and a case study on the Inishowen Song Project with its structure, content and potential as a resource locally and internationally.

Karin Bredenberg, Silke Jagodzinski: Archives Portal Europe – A Challenge of Harmonisation and Outreach

Abstract

The Archives Portal Europe is providing a central platform for publication of and research in archival material based on standardisation and tools, but also for professional exchange of knowledge and experiences. The text shows the approach of two European projects, APEnet and APEx, to define common profiles for the international archival standards from ICA for the portal in order to present different traditions of archival descriptions. While the challenge of harmonisation was tackled by building a network of European archivists, there is still the challenge of outreach. For further success we need to ensure the data quality of the provided archival descriptions and we must not forget the users requirements.

Ana María López Cuadrado: Working on European archival information system linking encoded data — the Census-Guide to Archives and EAG, a common history

Abstract

Census-Guide for Spanish and Latin American Archives was born in the 1980s, in the Archives Documentary Information Centre (CIDA), under the Ministry of Culture, with the objective of disseminating and controlling the Spanish documentary heritage. One decade later, the Latin American heritage was also included. Nowadays, Census-Guide is an archival information system that pursues a comprehensive standardisation of its data bases. Its work philosophy is based on cooperation with different archival institutions which want to enter their data in our system. They may use any of the online possibilities we offer. The enormous amount of information that the Census-Guide harbours (over 50,000 records) is the reason why it is essential to establish the most appropriate standardisation of information policies, as well as keeping updated with the advances in technology and in other sciences. Thus, it may improve not only the speed and reliability of the information recovery to researchers, but also the usability of our systems for archivists. At this time, the results offered by Web 2.0 and the philosophy of re-using the information, besides the importance of standardisation of data to achieve these two exponents, make the Census-Guide focus its efforts on this point. This is exactly where we are currently working.