National Archive and Records Administration (NARA)

The National Archive and Records Administration (NARA) is the record keeper of the United States goverment.

Catalog

The National Archives Catalog is a search interface to records held by the NARA that can be accessed online: https://catalog.archives.gov/

Data Model

NARA uses a hierarchical data model to organize the items it holds. The basic terms are:

• Record group: A grouping that comprises the records of a large goverment organization. For example Record Group 330 are records from the Office of the Secretary of Defense (1921 - 2008)
• Series: A grouping of file units or items according to some criteria.
• File unit: An organized unit of documents and files.
• Item: The smallest indivisible archival unit.

See NARA's own description for more information.

Digital Preservation Framework Linked Open Data

The NARA is much older than the Resource Description Framework (RDF), still some resources seem to be usable from RDF (see Digital Preservation Framework Linked Open Data).

There seems to be a naraid property defined (as seen in https://www.archives.gov/files/lod/dpframework/dpframeworkschema.ttl):

@prefix naraid: <https://www.archives.gov/data/lod/dpframework/id/> .

But no further information on this property and how it should be used.