How to manage your archive holdings as linked data using the open source ResearchSpace platform

[Baptiste De Coulon]

Dear all,

 

SAPA Fundation will have the opportunity to present his ResearchSpace migration project on September 9th at the LibreABC in Geneva (Day of free Softwares in Archives, Library et Documentation’s Center) : https://libreabc.ch/

 

The presentation will be in French but I give us the translate of the Summary of our Presentation :

 

How to manage your archive holdings as linked data using the open source ResearchSpace platform

 

The management of archival metadata in the form of Linked Data is at the heart of the new Records in Contexts [0] description standard published by the International Council on Archives. But what open-source tools can help us implement it?

 

The SAPA Foundation, the Swiss Performing Arts Archive [1], has been using Linked Data in production since 2021 in its collection management tool [2], and has been doing so since 2022, using the open source software GLAM-Community (metaphacts Semantic Platform for Cultural Heritage and Digital Humanities ) [3] based on the free ResearchSpace platform [4].

 

This presentation will provide an opportunity for feedback on its use. As these two tools are neutral from a professional point of view, we will explain what has already been developed to meet the specific needs of archivists, and what has yet to be developed. Hopefully, this will motivate other institutions to take the plunge, so that future development costs can be pooled. The presentation will focus on the platform as an internal archival information management system (AIS). We will not deal with interfaces dedicated to the public, which can be handled by other tools.

 

[0] https://www.ica.org/ica-network/expert-groups/egad/records-in-contexts-ric/

[1] https://sapa.swiss/

[2] https://doi.org/10.55790/journals/ressi.2024.e1511

[3] https://hub.docker.com/r/metaphacts/glam-community

[4] https://researchspace.org/

 

Best Regards

 

Baptiste

Baptiste de Coulon | data archiviste | Présent lundi, mardi matin, jeudi matin et vendredi

Fondation SAPA | Schanzenstrasse 15, Postfach, CH-3001 Bern | 031 301 52 52

 

 

 

[Florence Clavaud]

Hi Baptiste,

Thank you for this news!

As it is not mentioned in your email, I suppose the event will not be a hybrid one (both in person and online)? 

Anyawy, maybe you could add this event to the RiC resource list (https://ica-egad.github.io/RiC-ResourceList/), and, later on, if the event is recorded or some slides published, update this item of the list ?

Best,

Florence

[Lucia Giagnolini]

Dear Baptiste,

Thank you! If remote access is possible, I will follow the event with great pleasure. At the Department of Classical Philology and Italianistics of the University of Bologna we are in the process of migrating to ResearchSpace some projects, including the representation of the Valerio Evangelisti Archive made with an extension of RiC-O that I am working on for my PhD project. I will follow your developments with great interest!

Best,

Lucia Giagnolini

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[Pavel Zhelnov]

Dear Baptiste,

Thank you so much for this announcement. As a member of a proof-of-concept implementation of RiC at the Archives of Ontario, I was excited to hear about the ResearchSpace platform.

After my colleagues and I read your message, I had a chance to experiment with the platform a little bit. In particular, I installed it using the official instructions (via a non-Docker pathway because the researchspace Docker image currently seems to lack support for ARM architectures) and launched it without issues (it just took a minute or two for the server webpage to load after running the start script). Overall, I felt that the process was quite straightforward as long as Java 11 was installed (the official ResearchSpace website offers an instruction guide on installing Java 11, too).

Further, I loaded the RiC Ontology 1.1 RDF/XML file into it, together with a few named graphs we have developed as part of our project. All of my test Turtle, N-Triples, and TriG files (which I generated using our experimental spreadsheet-to-RDF conversion pipeline), containing archival descriptions, loaded without issues using one of the Settings menu items, and I was able to explore these using visual graph view/exploration interfaces within ResearchSpace.

I also appreciated the templating engine the platform offers to tailor its form-based interfaces for adding new resources to a custom ontology, as well as the platform’s ability to load data directly from Wikipedia/Wikidata. The use of the open source Blazegraph as the underlying quadstore also feels like a promising choice. I noticed other interesting platform features, which I did not have a chance to explore yet.

It would of course be interesting to hear about ongoing experiences with implementing ResearchSpace as an archival information management system based on RiC-O.

Best regards,

Pavel

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Pavel Zhelnov