RiC-FAD, RiC-CM, and RiC-O

[Johan Pieterse]

HI all

How will this change influance AtoM matadata schemas?

The version 1.0 release of RiC-FAD, RiC-CM, and RiC-O marks the first stable and complete version of the first three parts of RiC, and thus a major milestone in the development of the standard. RiC replaces the four ICA standards General International Standard Archival Description (ISAD(G)); International Standard Archival Authority Records–Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (ISAAR(CPF)); International Standard Description of Functions (ISDF); and International Standard Description of Institutions with Archival Holdings (ISDIAH). These four earlier standards will remain available. 

https://github.com/ICA-EGAD

[Dan Gillean]

Hi Johan, 

The short answer is: for now, it will not. 

Getting AtoM to support linked data will be a huge undertaking, even if we are just adding a sidecar to serialize data to RiC-O (like an export option), and not reorganizing the underlying data model and turning AtoM into a full Linked Data Platform as would be required for true support. That is something to be revisited in a next-generation version of AtoM.

Properly supporting RiC will require a lot of time, analysis, effort, and money - something we at Artefactual are still working on finding ways to secure without compromising our or AtoM's values or autonomy. In the meantime, we intend to continue supporting AtoM, either until a suitable replacement with a migration path is available, or until AtoM itself has evolved over many iterations to become its own successor. And, until there are more applications designed to support the authoring and exchange of archival linked data in user-friendly ways, I suspect that broad uptake of RiC will be slow, meaning AtoM will still have a place in web-accessible archival management. 

In the medium term, adding support for serializing existing AtoM archival metadata to RiC may be an interim option worth investigating further - but until there are aggregators and other linked data platforms out there making use of such data, it is not currently a top priority for AtoM's next steps. We will continue to monitor the archival landscape, and the input and priorities of our clients, as well as those of the broader community of AtoM users and trends within the archival profession as a whole. 

What follows below are my own personal opinions, and not necessarily those of the current AtoM maintainers, or of Artefactual as a whole.

Long-term, I personally truly believe that linked data is an important part of the future archival description and access, and have been saying so for a decade now. I hope to see it more widely embraced by our profession, and for there to be more freely available tools for creating, managing, and exchanging archival linked data - from both Artefactual and many others. As such, my personal hope is that AtoM3 (or whatever it may be called) be a linked data platform able to serialize archival metadata to multiple different ontologies and schemas - including but not limited to RiC - and is designed with a data model flexible enough to not be locked into any particular interpretation or serialization. 

In terms of RiC itself, I confess I remain  somewhat disappointed in some of the ways I saw valuable community feedback ignored throughout the RiC development process, and have some doubts about a few of the design choices made within the ontology and content model. Nevertheless, it is what we have, and I hope it succeeds, though it will require tooling for there to be broad adoption. It is worth noting that Artefactual approached the ICA many times about partnering (in many possible different ways) to ensure that RiC would launch alongside an open source solution that could fully implement RiC 1.0, and they showed little interest in even discussing the possibility - even when such talks did not involve funding sponsorship. Now that a 1.0 release announcement has been made, it also does not seem like such development possibilities were discussed with any other potential partners, and no ICA-supported or endorsed RiC platform is imminently forthcoming. Given that RiC cannot be implemented on paper AND cannot even be implemented easily without specific software and knowledge, I personally regret that RiC's entrance into the world may therefore inadvertently help to further entrench a sort of archival digital divide, until free and open-source solutions for supporting it are widely available. In terms of getting materials online and supporting standards-based exchange, this is exactly what the original ICA-AtoM project sought to mitigate with the rise of the web's importance in the early 2000s, and I had hoped that AtoM3 might play that same role as we try to follow Sir Tim Berners-Lee's suggestion to move from the world wide web to the giant global graph. Perhaps it may still - someday! But not immediately. 

Cheers, 

Dan Gillean, MAS, MLIS
AtoM Program Manager
Artefactual Systems, Inc.
604-527-2056

@accesstomemory

he / him

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[Johan Pieterse]

Hi Dan

I also believe the move/uptake will take some time. For now I am rolling out AtoM as far as I can.

Cheers