Archives, archival bond, and digital representation: A case study with the International Image Interoperability Framework

Abstract: Within the archival sector, digitization has long been a strategic initiative to ensure greater availability of historical documents. In recent years, the promotion of guidelines and standards, combined with technological advancements, has established methodologies and best practices and developed tools to facilitate massive digitization projects. However, despite the availability of technological solutions and guidelines, digitization is intended mostly to scan documents and make the outcome images available online. This practice can be problematic in representing the complex fonds structure made of relations, the archival bond that establishes the natural ordering of documents into archival units. This is particularly relevant when the fonds also has a multimedia component, such as an audiovisual component, that is often reproduced on different platforms disconnected from textual documents. This article addresses the challenges linked to digitization in the archival sector and proposes a methodological framework for representing fonds with respect to their native organization. For this purpose, the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) is employed to configure a specific model that respects the archive's hierarchical structure. In particular, this model is configured to maintain the archival bond and enhance the resource's semantic aspect to make the IIIF model semantically interoperable. To demonstrate the adaptability of the framework to the archival domain, in this work, the ''PCI-Unitelefilm'' fonds of the Fondazione Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico (AAMOD) served as the case study.