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Key Concepts & Glossary

A reference of the terminology used across The Archiver. Most of these are standard archival concepts — a few are app-specific.

Archival hierarchy​

Accession. A single batch of materials received in a single transaction or from a single source. The base unit of work in The Archiver — every file belongs to exactly one accession. Think "the box that arrived last Tuesday".

Fond. The body of records created or accumulated by a single person, family, organisation, or institution. Fond (plural fonds) reflects the archival principle of provenance — keep records from the same origin together. Available on Professional plans and above.

Sub-fond. A subdivision within a fond — usually used for major sub-units of a creating organisation (e.g. a department within a company's records).

Series. A group of records within a fond that share a common arrangement, function, or record type — meeting minutes, correspondence files, photograph albums.

Sub-series. A subdivision within a series.

Item. A single intellectual unit — one letter, one photograph, one recording. In The Archiver, every file in an accession becomes one item.

Description and metadata​

Data Model. The schema that defines which metadata fields exist for each category (Document, Photograph, Artefact, Audio, Video, Collection). Seeded with archival defaults; fully customisable per organisation. Lives at Settings → Data Model.

Custom fields. Fields you add to the Data Model beyond the defaults — donor reference, internal accession number, box location, anything your workflow needs.

Authority. A controlled value for a subject heading, person, place, or organisation, sourced from a published vocabulary so it's machine-resolvable to a URI. The Archiver links to:

  • LCSH — Library of Congress Subject Headings
  • FAST — Faceted Application of Subject Terminology
  • Getty AAT — Art & Architecture Thesaurus (materials, object types)
  • Getty TGN — Thesaurus of Geographic Names
  • VIAF — Virtual International Authority File (people, organisations)
  • GeoNames — geographic features and places
  • Wikidata — pan-disciplinary entities

Dossier. A thematic research folder — pulls items together by subject rather than provenance. Use a dossier for a research project, an exhibition, a forthcoming publication, or an enquiry response. Available on Professional plans and above.

Standards The Archiver maps to​

ISAD(G). General International Standard Archival Description. Influences the default fond/series hierarchy and the Description / Date / Extent / Scope and Content fields.

DACS. Describing Archives: A Content Standard. The US complement to ISAD(G).

Dublin Core. A 15-element minimal description set, widely supported by library and CMS software.

EAD3. Encoded Archival Description, 3rd version — the XML standard for archival finding aids.

Spectrum 5.1. UK Collections Trust standard for museum collections management.

PREMIS. Preservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies — provenance and preservation events.

BagIt. A directory-and-manifest packaging format for transfer between systems.

Processing terms​

OCR. Optical Character Recognition — extracting machine-readable text from images and scanned PDFs.

NER. Named Entity Recognition — pulling out people, places, organisations, and dates from text.

Transcription. Speech-to-text for audio and video.

Item cost. How many items a file counts against your monthly quota. Standard files count as 1; video items count as 3 because they're more expensive to process.

Confidence. The model's self-assessed certainty about a piece of extracted metadata. Low-confidence values are flagged for human review.

Subscription terms​

Community. Free tier — 20 items/month, 500 MB storage, documents and images only, 28-day file retention.

Professional. £29/mo — 250 items/month, 10 GB storage, audio and video, Fonds and Dossiers, all export formats. Permanent retention.

Team. £200/mo — Professional features for up to 10 seats with a shared organisation workspace.

Enterprise. Contact us — unlimited storage, higher monthly quotas, Full Analysis for dossiers, advanced AI features.