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Access to
archival records is highly dependent on the quality of archival
descriptions. Unfortunately, producing high quality descriptions is very
laborious and archives are forced to make compromises. This is especially
true in archives that have a constant flow of new acquisitions, as is the
case in most national archives. Consequently, archival descriptions tend to
have the following characteristics:
Fonds level descriptions are
rather comprehensive
Lower levels (series, file, item) are only provided with minimal
data
Collections are isolated: apart from catalogues that arrange fonds into general categories, there is no easy way to
access records horizontally, i.e. to find similar records across different
collections
One way
to improve archival descriptions is to add new dimensions to them using
faceted classification and then facilitate filling of the new data
structures with specifically designed software.
This
approach has been pursued at The National Archives of Estonia and our
presentation will cover the most interesting aspects:
Defining a set of taxonomies to be used in faceted classification
(time periods, places, topic keywords, persons/organisations)
Allowing linking of any description unit to any taxonomy item
Using automated tools to create new links between description units
and taxonomies
Using crowdsourcing to improve the descriptions
Finally,
we present our end-user access solution that takes advantage of the
"enhanced archival descriptions".
Throughout
the presentation, the theoretical considerations are illustrated by
examples from our Archival Information System AIS, where the principles
have been implemented.
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