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.


Figure 1. Example of a term record from the InterPARES 2 Terminology Database

 


Figure 2. Example of a term record with parts of term record labeled