Examples of community archives within institutional AtoM instances?

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Kelli Babcock

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Jul 21, 2025, 4:50:27 PMJul 21
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Hi everyone,

Does anyone have any examples of community archives represented as either an ISAAR authority record? Or, as ISDIAH records modified to represent identity-based archives or community archives that also share information_object entities across multiple other repository entities in the same AtoM instance?

The context I'm trying to understand how best to represent in the AtoM data model is when physical materials are preserved in multiple repositories in a single AtoM instance but they are also being collected, cared for, and provided access to by a community archive.

In terms of the AtoM entity relationship diagram, some of the information_objects (descriptions/finding aids) that exist in the AtoM instance are related to the repositories who preserve them physically - but these same information_objects will also need to be presented as part of the community archive as well. 

One idea that is being explored is to set up the community archives as an actor entity, suggested in ISDIAH 1.5, and then list the community archive with the "Collector" role for the information_object while the information_object will still be tied to the repository record for the archives who is preserving the material. We are still thinking this idea through but the first limitation we've come across is that creating the community archives as an actor entity will prevent the community archive from being represented in the "Maintaining Repository" field for the actor records (authority records) that are unique to the community archives. Since this field only allows repository entities to be pulled in, I'm not sure how the community archives actor record could be represented as the maintainer for those authorities. Having the community archive represented in the Maintaining Repository field for its actor entities is desired for data maintenance and discovery purposes. 

I do see some sort-of similar use cases in the AtoM installations list where a separate AtoM instance has been set up to represent a community project or community archives as its own discovery database[1] - but these contexts aren't exactly the same as the one I'm describing. Ideally for our context, the community archives can be represented in the existing institutional AtoM instance and alongside the repositories who are physically preserving materials.

Hoping someone in the forum might have ideas or examples - even if they're workarounds. 

Thanks in advance for any help, take care,
Kelli

[1] From the AtoM installations list some examples of AtoM instances that are not really the same context that I describe above but represent a community-based project or community archives initiative in a single AtoM instance with data aggregated from multiple repositories:

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