National Archive Project for Women Religious

Women religious archives are geographically dispersed, described unevenly, and often not digitized. A common exchange profile allows NAPWR to expose consistent, high-value discovery metadata while respecting local practices, staffing realities, and phased digitization.

NAPWR will operate with four hub locations, each maintaining its own ArchivesSpace instance as the system of record for its holdings. The portal will function as a service provider that harvests standardized metadata from each hub (via ArchivesSpace's built-in OAI-PMH interface and/or approved exports), and indexes it for portal-wide search, facets, and browse.

Click the Example of Platform Structure, Capabilities and Access to preview potential design.

NAPWR discovery does not require full digitization. For many items, a thumbnail (or representative preview image) plus a stable link back to the hub's ArchivesSpace record is sufficient to:

• Confirm relevance
• Support browsing
• Route researchers to the correct repository for access

This approach is aligned with using a "preview" URL plus "available at / web view" links (preview → portal browsing; isShownAt/isShownBy → hub context and best-available access).

NAPWR will require standardized rights statements (RightsStatements.org URIs and/or CC Public Domain Mark where applicable) and expects partners to protect privacy by excluding or redacting PII from portal-shared representations. NAPWR will also encourage remediation or contextualization of harmful legacy descriptions before portal exposure.

• A shared public portal with consistent browsing and filtering (congregation, hub, record type, date span, place, subjects, languages, ministries/charisms, etc.)
• Reduced duplication of effort and clearer pathways for congregations seeking partner support
• A scalable foundation for future enhancements (full digital delivery, IIIF, citation builder, enrichment services)

Note: This is written as an exchange profile (what the portal needs), not a mandate to redesign anyone's local ArchivesSpace practices. See the Guide to Converting ArchivesSpace Records to Portal-Ready Metadata.

What we're describing:

• Hub Repository (one of the four)
• Component/Item (Archival Object and/or Digital Object as exposed)
• Collection/Resource (ArchivesSpace Resource / the women religious body)
• Title (Name given to the resource)
• Source (Finding Aid URI/URL)
• Digital Representation (optional; may be thumbnail-only)

The portal should contain these fields: 

Strongly recommended for best portal UX:

These fields power the portal facets:

• Subjects (Topical): LCSH where feasible (with URI) (id.loc.gov)
• Missions: Local Dictionary
• Place (spatial): Getty TGN preferred for place normalization (with URI) (Getty TGN)
• Extent: Brief physical extent for context (pages/photos/hours)
• Description/Abstract: Short narrative snippet for search results

The portal generates citations in Chicago style, assembled from title, date, identifier, box/folder, collection, repository, and URL.

A practical approach: store both (a) the human-readable label and (b) the authoritative URI when available. Use reconciliation tools (e.g., OpenRefine, Python) against the sources below. See Mapping-EAD-DC-Portal Controlled Vocabulary and Mapping for a complete list of controlled terms, notes, and examples.

• LCSH (subjects): Library of Congress Linked Data Service
• LCNAF (names): LC Linked Data Service – Names
• Getty AAT (resource types/genres): Getty Vocabularies (AAT)
• Getty TGN (places): Getty Vocabularies (TGN)
• RightsStatements.org (rights URIs): rightsstatements.org vocabulary
• ISO 639-3 (language codes): SIL ISO 639-3 tables
• ISO 8601/W3CDTF date guidance: W3C NOTE-datetime

These are the lists the portal can reliably facet even when external authority control is uneven

(Click on the Controlled Vocabs Sheet for guidance.)

NAPWR Hub (4 values)

Congregation (Corporate Body)

Preferred form + variant forms (for legacy search)

Content Category (Series-level)

• Governance    
• Formation
• Ministries
• Community Life
• Spirituality/Charism
• Missions
• Education
• Healthcare
• Social Justice
• Administration/Finance
• Property/Buildings
• Publications
• Visual Materials
• Audio/Oral History
• Artifacts/Objects
• Digital Records

Access Flag

• Open
• Restricted
• On-site only
• Permission required (portal display rules)

Digitization Status

• Thumbnail only
• Partial digital
• Fully digitized (helps manage expectations)

Field: Contributing Hub → dcterms:publisher

Identifies which NAPWR hub provided the record. Use one of the four agreed labels. Values must match the forms in the elements-controlled tab exactly.

Field: Women Religious Archival Genre (Record type) → dcterms:type

Describes what kind of record the object is (genre/form), not the subject. Uses a shared list of terms such as:

• General chapter records

• House chronicles

• Necrologies

• Newsletters

• Photographic prints

• Oral history interviews

Each term has a short scope note and a suggested Getty AAT mapping in the workbook. Choose one main genre for the portal; keep extra local genres in your own system if needed.

Field: Carrier / technical format → dcterms:format

Records the technical format using MIME / IANA media types when possible. Examples:

• application/pdf – PDF access copies
• image/tiff – master scans
• image/jpeg – access images
• audio/wav – preservation audio
• audio/mpeg – MP3 access audio
• video/mp4 – access video

Note: ArchivesSpace  has a pre-loaded set of carriers and formats called 'Containers' and 'Instances'. 

Field: Extent → dcterms:extent

Separates the number from the unit during mapping (e.g., 12 + linear feet), then combines them into a human-readable string for the portal.

Common extent units include: linear feet, cubic feet, boxes, folders, items, volumes, reels (audio), cassettes (audio), videocassettes, film reels, photographs, photo albums, negatives, slides, digital files, gigabytes, megabytes, minutes (sound recordings), minutes (moving images).

Note: ArchivesSpace has a preloaded list of Extent Types. 

Field: Language → dcterms:language

Uses ISO 639-3 codes as the controlled values (e.g., eng, fra, zho). The workbook provides both the label and code for common languages used in NAPWR collections. For the portal export, use the code; labels can be handled locally.

Field: dcterms:subject

NAPWR will use a shared list of Catholic subject headings focused on women religious and canon law. Use these terms when LC/LCSH does not adequately cover the concept. Do not create local variations if a NAPWR heading already exists; propose new terms to the group so they can be added to the shared list.

The mapping workbook is the authoritative home for these controlled lists. Local systems (ArchivesSpace, etc.) can keep their own labels, but export scripts should normalize to NAPWR values for portal delivery. Any changes to the lists should be coordinated through the NAPWR working group and reflected in an updated version of the workbook.

This overview of the workflow lets each hub use its local ArchivesSpace instance as the system of record, export EAD, convert EAD into an Excel editing sheet, then generate a NAPWR portal-ready CSV (Dublin Core/DCTERMS) that the portal can ingest and index while always linking back to the hub record.

See a breakdown of workflow in the Converting ArchivesSpace Records to Portal-Ready Metadata Guide.

Note: Use oXygen editor 23.1 or the XML editor available for your institution. Download the 'aspace-plus-excel-at-yale-2021-03-30.xpr' for this process. 

Goal: Produce a flat table where each row = a "portal record" (often a component/archival object, series-level depending on what you want exposed)

Goal: Produce a pre-defined, mapped worksheet that includes NAPWR portal-ready mappings.

See the simplified walk-through at the EAD Transform Guide.

For existing digitized and born-digital materials, the project will accept files at the standards at which they were digitized, with the exception of materials of such poor quality that they will not meet the project's goals.

See the digitization guides: (1) Scanning Text and Images; (2) Audio Digitization Guidelines; (3) Moving Images and Video Digitization Guide.

It is recommended that newly digitized materials for the project follow the digitization guidelines for Master Preservation Copies provided below. However, access copies (as defined in section 2.5.2 of the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative may be hosted by partner institutions and used for harvest into the portal.

The following standards are informed by the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) and the Library of Congress Recommended Formats Statement, and are for Master Preservation Copies. Use the A/V Preservation and Digitization Handbook for guidance with media. 

Master Preservation Copies

Preferred Access Copy Formats

Institutions should use a stable, provenance-carrying naming convention for all digital files. Names should meaningfully encode:

• collection or congregation code - (example: HARC_010)
• series / box / folder / item - (example: 7_1_1_2_0001)

This ensures files remain traceable both inside the institution and when served to the NAPWR portal.

Output:     HARC_010_7_1_1_2_0001