ID: 9

SIBILE – DE GRIMOÜARD, Claire; MOTTE, Alice
Curriculum	Since January 2010, Claire Sibille – de Grimoüard has been responsible for electronic archiving, arrangement and description, digitization, and preservation at the Service interministériel des archives de France (Ministry of Culture and communication). In this capacity she has to coordinate and validate the development and the implementation of standards in these areas, to provide expertise to agencies implementing electronic archiving, and to exert control over buildings construction projects of local archives. Claire is also a member of the SAA Technical Sub-Committee on EAD and of the ICA Program Commission.
	Alice Motte was head curator to the Archives départementales de la Lozère before joining the staff of the Service interministeriel des archives de France. Currently, she is deputy of the head of Archival Processing Office. In her capacity, she has to guide and monitor digitization projects. She is also a member of the ICA experts group on archival description.

Title:	Archives and Linked Data: are our tools ready to “complete the picture”? Two case studies
Brief summary:	This paper will present how French archives implement Linked Data concepts through two projects which converge with initiatives led by other cultural heritage professions. The first one aims to bring a thesaurus on to the Web of Linked Data. The objective of the other one is to develop a national authority file describing local public agencies.
Content:	Archivists continually strive to provide new ways to publicize their collections and to allow patrons to connect documents and information in meaningful ways. One of the most cutting-edge trends in sharing information online is Linked Data in order to add richness to the way users experience archival materials and to present archival resources as a part of the diverse data sources on the Web. This paper will present two initiatives which were initially launched by the Department of French archives (Service interministériel des archives de France) in order to meet archival needs and which ultimately will create information networks between cultural heritage institutions and beyond. The first project was designed to represent a thesaurus in a machine-understandable way for automating machine-assisted indexing processes and also to make it available on the Web with a straightforward navigation within it. The initial scope has been recently extended in order to set up a new management environment for all the scientific and technical vocabularies of the French Ministry of Culture and communication. The other one initially aimed to produce a set of standardized forms of names as well as pattern records that territorial archival institutions might reuse and complete to describe specific local records creators related to the archival resources they kept. Currently, we wonder what identification code we should assign to the described entities both for use in business applications used by archival institutions and electronic records systems, and for use with Linked Data technologies in a global environment.
Scientific contribution:	We would like to share our feedback and best practices on our experiments with publishing and linking archival data: creation of new services based on archival linked data, recommendations with the use of archival standards in RDF, linked data and open data, licensing issues, organizational issues such as training, etc. The related data sets are available at: http://data.culture.fr/thesaurus/ (thesaurus for indexing local archives) and http://aaf.ica-atom.org/ (authority records describing local agencies).
Keywords:	Archival Resource Key (ARK); authority data; controlled vocabulary; International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI); interoperability; Linked Data; Resource Description Framework (RDF); Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS); SPARQL