This video project involved the creation of an educational, documentary style video designed to explain the collaborative project between The Archive of Ontario and University of Toronto’s GLAM Incubator.

Constrained by tradition and technology, archival descriptions have historically focused on two things: the records themselves and the people and organizations that create these records. But because the reality of record creation is far more complex, often with multiple people and organizations making their own unique contributions, this method has left a lot of information unexplored and undocumented. 

For more than a decade, the International Council on Archives has been looking to develop a new standard for archival description, leading to the release last fall of its new Records in Contexts model. When Aaron Hope, senior archivist at the Archives of Ontario, who has followed the issue closely, read about it, he was excited by the possibilities of the proposed graph-based data model for archival description. 

In a nutshell, the new standard is designed to do three things. It links out to external data sources. It’s more expressive and allows archivists to document more of the complexity. And it makes archives more discoverable.