Re: Archive as a collection of things

Some good points Sarah - comments below...

Two properties stick out to me that are not covered as far as I can tell in
> the generic Collection schema:
>
> 1. Holding archives/institution: because archives are unique, it's
> important to record the institution that holds the collection.
>

> Related to this point:
>
> 2. Custodial history, or the archival history of the collection before and
> during its custody in an institution. This is important to record for
> making presumptions of authenticity and understanding the limits to what
> the collection contains (e.g., half of it was lost in a fire, etc)
>

There are a couple of potential approaches to these points.  Firstly coming
at it from the holding organization's point of view:

   - Organization <http://schema.org/Organization> has an owns
   <http://schema.org/owns> property that has OwnershipInfo
   <http://schema.org/OwnershipInfo>  as one of the options in its range.
   OwnershipInfo <http://schema.org/OwnershipInfo> has some useful
   properties for capturing some of the things you describe associated with
   ArchivesCollections it may hold.
   - Some of the current descriptions of these properties are very Product
   focused, but recommending that an Organization can additionally own
   CreativeWorks (such as an ArchivesCollection) could well work.

Secondly from the point of view of describing the same current and
historical information for a collection:

   - The OwnershipInfo Type could be enhanced to include the owner
   Organization
   - The proposed ArchivesCollection could have an ownedBy property which
   would have Organization, Person, and OwnershipInfo in its range


> Giovanni touched on this in the other thread covering items in collections.
>
> Re: CreativeWork: in addition to the examples that you raise Richard,
> there is a lot of content in archival collections which many would argue
> isn't "creative" in nature, such as data, governmental documents, etc. I
> would be glad to see us expand the hasPart idea beyond the scope of
> CreativeWork.
>

So will I.  Not sure that in the generic Schema.org world that you could
argue that a government document is not a type of CreativeWork, but there
are many other non-CreativeWork items that can be found in Archives.

>
>