Archive Collection and Archived Item

Hi there,

I had a huge email written as I was working this out, but I’ve tried my best to distill it down to one essential question….. 

There is a type ‘ArchiveCollection', which has ’super types’ of CreativeWork’ and ‘ArchivedItem’ with properties we can use to describe our thing(s). 

To take an example, let’s say I wanted to have schema.org markup attached to: 

A collection or ‘top level’ description: https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/data/gb2607-ec/1-12 

A lower level description: https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/data/gb2607-ec/1-12/ec/7 

All I know about these are that one is ‘top level’ so that there are no parent levels above it, but there may be child levels. The other is lower level, so it has at least one parent level. 

Can I just treat the lower level ’thing(s)' as type=ArchiveCollection? So, I can I use the properties from CreativeWork and ArchivedItem for both the top level and lower level group of stuff?  

I don’t want to distinguish between collection and item actually within the archive; I just want to apply schema.org markup using the appropriate types and associated properties.  

Richard defined Collection:  

“ArchiveCollection: The collection/grouping/assemblage of archived items. Descriptive properties reference the collection as a whole.”

I want to separate this out from what archivist thing of as an archive collection, and treat it simply as a ‘group of things’ or even just one thing if that represents a stand-alone collection. Is this correct? 

The archive.schema.org defines ‘ArchivedItem’ as ‘an item in an archive collection’. But I thought it was a ‘type' that is applied to ArchiveCollection? I didn’t think it actually related to ‘item’ meaning a single thing. 

I think there is some confusion in the documentation between the term ‘ArchivedItem’, which I understand to be a type that can be applied to an ArchiveCollection, with properties of ‘archive-ness’,  and an actual item in a collection (and we don’t usually describe single items anyway). It maybe doesn’t help that the properties within ArchivedItem are ‘item’ - e.g. itemDescription, itemLocation, itemProvenance. Can I see them as archiveunitDescription, archiveunitLocation, archiveunitProvenance.

NB - that’s why in EAD we use ‘unit’ and not anything like ‘item’  - because we can only know that it is a unit within a whole. 

cheers
Jane

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Received on Tuesday, 11 April 2017 09:16:48 UTC