NAPWR Women Religious Archives Portal Standard

Draft Version 0.1

This standard defines the metadata exchange profile and technical requirements for the National Archives for the Preservation of Women Religious (NAPWR) portal. The portal will provide unified discovery across four hub locations while maintaining distributed authority and respecting local practices.

Click on each heading below for detailed information, links, and guidance.
1. Why a Standardized Approach

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.

1.1 Distributed ArchivesSpace, Unified Portal

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.

Key Principle: Records remain authoritative at the hub, and the portal always links users back to the hub record for complete context and requests. This mirrors the "harvesting model for partner content" approach used in ACDAP.
1.2 No Need to Digitize Everything

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).

1.3 Rights, Privacy, and Responsible 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.

2. NAPWR Metadata Model: Core Exchange Profile

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.

 

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.

 

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. 

Roundtripping EAD → Excel — short walkthrough showing: export EAD → transform in oXygen → map to portal CSV.
Transcript · Download video
2.1 Minimum Entities

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)

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

Strongly recomemended for best portal UX:

  • Preview (thumbnail URL)

    Definition: URL of thumbnail representing the object.
    Application: If no digitization exists, hubs may supply a representative preview (collection-level image) or a standard placeholder image
    Mapping: edm:preview

    Web View / Best-Available Digital Representation

    Definition: Direct URL to best-available representation.
    Mapping: edm:isShownBy
3. Controlled Vocabularies & “Starting Strategy”

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.

3.1 Authority Sources (Recommended)
3.2 NAPWR Local Controlled Lists

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)

Boston College Catholic Religious Archives Repository
Heritage and Research Center at Saint Mary's
Santa Clara University Archives and Special Collections
Women Religious Archives Collaborative

 

4 Existing Born-Digital or Digitized Files

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.

Scanning Webpage Audio Webpage Video Webpage

 

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.

 

🚨 Note:  Full A/V Preservation and Digitization Handbook can be reviewed for reference. 🚨  

🚨 Note: Full Oral History Interviews Data Curation Primer  is available for use.🚨

5 Digitization Guidelines (FADGI-aligned)

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

Material Type Resolution Color File Format Min. Bit Depth
Textual Minimum 400 dpi; 600 preferred Color preferred to grayscale Uncompressed TIFF 24
Visual (photographic, artwork, maps, posters) Minimum 600 dpi Color preferred to grayscale Uncompressed TIFF 24
Audio 44.1 kHz/16-bit or higher n/a Uncompressed WAV or MP3 (access copy) n/a
Video 10 bits n/a Uncompressed MOV or MPEG-4 OR MP4 (access copy) n/a

 

Preferred Access Copy Formats

Material Type Resolution Color Access Format
Textual Minimum 300 dpi Color preferred to grayscale .pdf
Visual (photographic, artwork, maps, posters) Minimum 300 dpi Color preferred to grayscale .jpg
Audio Refer to A/V Process n/a Compressed or uncompressed WAV or MP3
Video Refer to A/V Process n/a Compressed or uncompressed MOV or MPEG-4 OR MP4
6 File Naming Convention

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 / sub-series / sub-group / 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

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