Context-based aggregation of archival data: the role of authority records in the semantic landscape

Abstract

The formal release of Encoded Archival Context for Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF) in 2010 added the need to deal with an additional standard to encode context and authority records. But the possibilities of EAC-CPF go beyond the control of authority records and access points, and this standard constitutes a relevant milestone in the definition of a complex archival information system made up of interconnected, cross-linked records. Based on eXtensible Markup Language, EAC-CPF makes possible the design of semantically rich browsing experiences that give access to distributed description of records and to the detailed data of the persons, corporate bodies, or families that created them. This paper presents a collaboration framework for archival information systems that exploits the relationships built between finding aids and shared context and authority records encoded in EAC-CPF. The proposed architecture is built on top of a set of software components that interact using open information retrieval, content aggregation, and semantic data standards. On top of this architecture, different user-oriented solutions can be built to browse and explore the contents of the aggregated collections. One of these applications is a navigational aid or topic map that serves as a semantically enriched access layer and ensures the location of the records held by different archives. The proposed architecture can be applied to solve different information access challenges that require a single point of access to distributed data. It can be deployed or mapped to existing technical architectures to improve the interaction of users with a set of networked repositories.