Purpose of the InterPARES 2 Terminology Database
The purpose of the InterPARES 2 Terminology Database (ITD) is to support
researchers in understanding concepts across disciplines that have
come to address issues of preserving dynamic, experiential, and interactive
authentic records in electronic systems. Archival Science, Information
Science, Computer Science, Geomatics, Music, Film, Dance, and Law have
all brought expertise, and terminology to this project. The ITD facilitates
communication and research by defining terms and relationships between
terms used in the research.
Scope of the InterPARES 2 Terminology Database
To prepare the terms and the definitions for the ITD, researchers,
research assistants, and consultants worked with research documents,
dictionaries, and glossaries from the various fields represented in
the InterPARES 2 research project. These included Arts (Film, Music,
Dance), Sciences (Geomatics, Physics, and Astronomy), Government (Law,
Policy, and E-Government), and Archival, Information, and Computer
Sciences. The ITD also uses general dictionaries where appropriate.
Structure of the InterPARES 2 Terminology Database
There are two main components to the ITD. They are (1) the Glossary and
(2) the Dictionary. The Glossary provides the approved term and definition
used in research (working documents and published documents) that comes
from IP2. Because the terms that are approved may have multiple definitions
in a multidisciplinary research project, we must account for plurality
of meaning. The Dictionary helps us with that. The Dictionary contains
all the terms from the Glossary, but unlike the Glossary, the Dictionary
provides multiple definitions for a single term. Each of these definitions
is marked as coming from a particular discipline (e.g., Science, Archives,
or Arts), and from a particular source (e.g., Art and Architecture
Thesaurus, Dictionary of Computing, or A Glossary of Archival and Records
Terminology). Sources are of two kinds: dictionaries in the field or
research documents from InterPARES 1 or 2.
Structure of a Term Record
Each term record in the ITD has a structure. That structure (1) lists the term, (2) lists the part of speech, (3) provides a definition (highlighted bold when appears in both Dictionary and Glossary), (4) lists the discipline, and (5) provides the source of the definition. Figure 1 below shows an example term record.