Heratio Help Center article. Category: User Guide.

Choosing a description standard

An archival description in Heratio does not have to be ISAD(G). The same record can be catalogued - and re-catalogued - in the standard that suits the material: ISAD(G), Records in Contexts (RiC-O), DACS, RAD, MODS, or Dublin Core. You pick the standard on the form itself, the fields reshape to match, and the record keeps everything it already had.

Older releases only let you export a record as RAD or DACS, or flip a database column by hand. That is gone. Selecting a standard is now a normal part of cataloguing, on both the Add form and the edit form.

Picking the standard while you catalogue

Open Add (/informationobject/add) or edit any description. At the top of the form is an Administration area, and its first field is Description standard. Choose one of the six standards there.

The moment you change it, the field set below reshapes - no page reload. RiC-O frames the whole record as rico: elements; MODS shows MODS elements; DACS and RAD show their national fields; Dublin Core narrows to the fifteen DC terms. A line under the selector says exactly this, so nobody has to guess what the dropdown does.

ISAD(G) is the default. Whatever you pick, Save writes through that standard's own handler, and the record remembers the choice (its source_standard and display standard). Come back to edit it later and you land on the same standard, with the fields you filled in.

Nothing is thrown away when you switch. A value that has a home in both standards carries across; anything specific to the standard you left simply stops showing. The description underneath is still the one canonical record.

The Administration area

Three things live here and stay put while the description fields swap around them:

Field	What it does
Description standard	The selector described above - the single source of the record's standard.
Publication status	Draft or Published. Drafts stay hidden from anonymous visitors.
Source language	The record's language of description.

Because this block sits outside the part that swaps, your publication status and the standard selector never disappear when you change standards.

Level of description is scoped to the sector

The Level of description dropdown only offers the levels that make sense for the record's sector. An archival description gives you Fonds, Subfonds, Collection, Series, Subseries, File, Item, Part and Record group. A museum object, a library item, a gallery artwork or a DAM asset each get their own list instead. You will not see "Fonds" offered on a museum object or "Specimen" on an archival series.

This holds whichever standard you switch to - RiC-O, DACS and RAD all inherit the same sector filter as plain ISAD(G).

Opening the form already set to a standard

You can link straight to a pre-set form:

/informationobject/add?standard=ric
/informationobject/add?standard=dacs&parent=1234

standard= takes a code - isad, ric, dacs, rad, mods, dc. Codes are portable: the same link works on every Heratio server.
parent= (or parent_id=) makes the new description a child of that record.

A numeric standardId= is also accepted, for links arriving from another system. Prefer the code form for anything you build yourself - internal term ids differ from one database to the next, so a numeric link is not portable.

When the form opens from one of these links, the correct field set is already loaded. The same is true after a failed save: if validation sends you back, the standard you chose is still selected and its fields are still shown.

Creating a child in a chosen standard

On any archival record page, the Add new button carries a caret (the small arrow beside it). Open it and you get Add child description in followed by the six standards, with RiC-O first. Pick one and the new description opens in that standard, already parented to the record you were looking at.

The plain Add new button still makes an ordinary ISAD(G) child, so the quick path is unchanged.

The six standards at a glance

Standard	Origin	Good for
ISAD(G)	International Council on Archives	General multilevel archival description; the default.
RiC-O 1.0	International Council on Archives	Relationship-rich description - agents, activities, instantiations and events as first-class things. See the RiC user guide.
DACS	United States	US archival practice.
RAD	Canada	Canadian archival practice.
MODS 3.x	Library of Congress	Bibliographic / library-leaning material.
Dublin Core	DCMI	Simple, fifteen-element records and lightweight interchange.

Each standard is delivered as its own package, so a client install can ship with only the ones it needs. If a package is absent, its option simply does not appear and the form falls back to ISAD(G) - nothing breaks.

Exporting and importing a single standard

Cataloguing in a standard and exchanging that standard as a file are separate jobs. Exports live on the metadata-export dashboard at /admin/metadata-export/index: pick the standard, pick the record, download.

GET /admin/metadata-export/download/{format}?io={information_object_id}

{format} is dcterms, mods, rad, dacs, or ric (RiC-O as Turtle; ric.rdf for RDF/XML). The existing Dublin Core, EAD, EAC and MARC exports are unchanged.

RAD and DACS XML can be brought back in:

POST /admin/metadata-export/import/{format}

with an uploaded xml_file or an xml body field. By default you get a JSON preview - every parsed record, the information_object it matched (or null), and any warnings. Add dryRun=0 (or commit=1) to write the parsed values into the standard's sidecar. Matching is by identifier: RAD reads <identifier>, DACS tries <recordIdentifier> then <referenceCode>. Records that match nothing are reported and left uncommitted on purpose - RAD/DACS import enriches records that already exist, it does not bulk-load new ones. Use MARC or EAD for that.

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