Apply to be a Collaborative Testing Partner (March 30, 2021)

Sharon Leon
March 31, 2021

In undertaking the work of developing a descriptive model that could represent the lived experiences of enslaved people who were owned by or worked for colleges and universities, the On These Grounds Project Team made a commitment to thoroughly testing that model with a range of collaborative partners. Over the past nine months, the core team has worked hard to develop an alpha event ontology that well-represents the information that is available in the archival holdings of four institutions. Now we are ready to move on to the next stage of our work, which is to recruiting a set of four Collaborative Testing Partners to offer wider feedback on the model.

Between July 2021 and June 2022, the selected partners will use the alpha ontology to describe the events that arise in their own archival holdings, recording their experience with the process of description and the fitness of the model to adequately capture the information they see in their records. Based on this feedback, we will continue to refine the ontology in anticipation of publishing a 1.0 version in the summer of 2022.

If you would like to put together a team at your institution to apply to be a testing partner, please review the details of the full call for applications.

While we can only select four institutions to be official testing partners, we will make all of the resources related to the alpha model available, including all documentation and implementation guides, so that other groups can work with the ontology as we undertake this wider phase of testing.

If you have any questions about the call for testing partners or the project, please feel free to reach out via email.