MiaGLAM tech / metadata folk (but mostly probably Archives folk in practice), some help with a vibe check - if I say 'records in context', what's your response?
Dorothea Salo@mia RIC-O ontology. Also "kill it with fire."
@mia N.b. I am a linked-data nerd, so I should not be considered "typical librarian" wrt ontologies.
@mia @platypus slightly more seriously:
standards developers tend to go about things one of two ways
one is "the simplest way that could possibly work," e.g. BagIt, PCDM, OCFL, even .epub back in the day when I worked on it
one is "chisel it in stone like Moses, only we're gonna need a LOT more stone" e.g. FGDC (gah), FRBR, RIC-O, OAIS
I have seen too many of the latter category crash and burn to trust chiseled-stone standards architecture much
Hector Correa@hectorjcorrea @mia @platypus I mean, there can be failure modes in both directions.
OAI-PMH was trying to be "the simplest thing," it's just that van de Sompel and Lagoze completely overestimated their target user population (scientists).
In fact, "not understanding either the problem space or the target user population" may be THE COMMONEST standards failure mode, now I think about it.
OAIS has never understood the whole of the problem space.
@hectorjcorrea @mia @platypus Whereas in the early days of .epub, we had key user populations represented on the working group:
* publishing production people (me, at the time)
* ebook hardware/software designers and coders
* markup/web nerds (also me)
and without any of those groups .epub would have failed HARD.
@hectorjcorrea @mia @platypus Agree. "Does too little" is also fixable in a way "overbuilt to unusability" isn't.
Ben O'Steen@benosteen @dsalo @platypus I think it was @thisisaaronland who said 'if you can get two people to agree how to do something, you've got a standard', way back in the day
Ruth [☕️ 👩🏻💻📚✍🏻🧵🪡🍵]
Frieke
David Haskiya@mia I don't know what vibe means, but we're (slowly) building support for it as an output format in our public APIs (serialised as JSON-LD). At some point I expect we may build support for it also a data-in format.
It'll take years, more than a decade I think, before it completely replaces EAD though.
James Truitt (he/him)@mia Do you mean the ontology? Bad vibes
The general principle? Sure! I don't love the way it's sometimes interpreted to mean "Access MUST be through a finding aid", but in general, yeah, provenance, original order, respect du fonds, and hierarchical description help give meaning to (or preserve meaning of) records.
Greg Wiedeman has a great paper on the way that archival context is often neglected in online access portals: https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/16963
Designing Digital Discovery and Access Systems for Archival Description
Archival description is often misunderstood by librarians, administrators, and technologists in ways that have seriously hindered the development of access and discovery systems. It is not widely understood that there is currently no off-the-shelf system that provides discovery and access to digital materials using archival methods. This article is an overview of the core differences [...]
@linguistory I loved that paper! I'm disappointed I haven't seen it discussed more widely. And thanks for your other helpful comments