The International Digital Archives Conference

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Glossary

1

Digital humanities

An area of scholarship that applies computational methods - text encoding, corpus analysis, data visualisation, digital editions - to humanities research questions, usually in close partnership with libraries and archives that hold the source material.

2

Digital preservation

The set of policies and technical processes that keep digital objects readable and authentic over decades, covering fixity checking, format migration, metadata retention and succession planning for the organisation that holds them.

3

OAIS

The Open Archival Information System reference model (ISO 14721), the common vocabulary for designing trustworthy digital archives: it defines how information is ingested, stored, and made accessible to a designated community.

4

Metadata

Structured description of a resource - title, creator, date, rights, format, provenance - that makes a digitised or born-digital object findable, understandable and manageable over time.

5

Authority control

The practice of using one consistent, documented form for names, places and subjects so that every item by or about the same entity collates correctly in the catalogue and in linked data exports.

6

Linked data

Publishing collection data as resolvable URIs with typed relationships so that records can be connected across institutions, for example reconciling a person in a manuscript catalogue against a national name authority.

7

IIIF

The International Image Interoperability Framework: a set of shared APIs that lets institutions serve high-resolution images and let users compare, annotate and deep-zoom items from different repositories in one viewer.

8

Handwritten text recognition (HTR)

Machine learning based transcription of handwritten documents, trained on page images and ground-truth transcription; it is the usual route to searchable manuscript and archive collections, and Arabic-script HTR remains an active research area.

9

Digitisation

The end-to-end process of converting analogue material into digital surrogates: object preparation, imaging, quality control, OCR or HTR, metadata capture and ingest into a repository.

10

Institutional repository

A managed online collection, typically run by a university or research body, that stores, preserves and exposes the scholarly output and research data of that institution.

11

FAIR principles

Guidelines that research objects should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable; increasingly applied to cultural heritage and archival datasets as well as research data.

12

Fixity

Verification that a digital file has not changed unexpectedly, usually by comparing cryptographic checksums recorded at ingest against checksums computed later during storage audits.

13

Knowledge graph

A graph-structured dataset of entities and relationships, used in libraries and archives to connect people, places, works and events across collections and to power semantic search and recommendation.

14

Emulation

A preservation strategy that recreates an obsolete computing environment so original software and interactive digital objects can still be run and experienced, as an alternative to migrating them to current formats.