Archival Description Turns Truly Collaborative: an Exercise in Records in Contexts Standard

This paper presents an exercise and research conducted by the author at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Zagreb University. It aimed to teach archival description subjects to his BA students and link results using the Records in Contexts (RIC) standard, RDF Turtle standard, and a graph database. The exercise spanned five weeks, during which students had to create the archival description of an exemplary records aggregation of notable historian Jaroslav Šidak, provided by the Faculty Archives. This exercise aimed to examine the potential of RIC and linked data technologies to facilitate collaboration among archivists, reduce the description-related work through decentralization, enable re-using and linking descriptions, and visualize results. The author offers a conclusion regarding collaborative work and creating new knowledge from archived heritage. Finally, some further directions regarding these subjects are being proposed.