Re: Archive as a collection of things

Hi Richard,

1) with regard to the two potential approaches there is a major issue: 
"owns" (ie "Products owned by the organization or person" [sic]) is not 
an adequate property for describing custody. When we talk about 
custodial history we are not necessarily talking about owning. Archives 
may be deposited, or borrowed (e.g., for an exhibition), so at a given 
time they may be possessed by an archival institution, while being owned 
(i.e. possessed by right) by some other subject. The custodial history 
is the story of the custody, not the story of the owners. We need to 
trace it, because it provides fundamental information to assess 
authenticity.

2) with regard to archives as CreativeWorks, I agree with you: it cannot 
be argued that "a government document is not a type of CreativeWork", 
not because it is indeed, but because as a matter of fact CreativeWorks 
are not defined. It is strange though that we can find email messages, 
datasets, books, and any sort of things in the CreativeWorks bucket, 
while documents and records have not been mentioned at all. I think 
first of all we should define a class for Document, since the bulk of an 
archives is made by documents after all.

Giovanni




On 2015-08-07 1:04 AM, Richard Wallis wrote:
> 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.
>
>

Received on Friday, 7 August 2015 01:11:08 UTC