Heratio Help Center article. Category: Integration.

Records in Contexts (RiC)

Understanding Archival Relationships

What is RiC?

Records in Contexts (RiC) is a new way of describing archives that shows how everything connects. Instead of just listing records, RiC reveals:

• Who created the records
• What activities produced them
• Where they came from
• How they relate to other records

Think of it like a family tree, but for archives.

The RiC Explorer

Finding It

On any record page, look for the RiC tab or panel. This shows you the record's relationships.

Understanding the Graph View

2D Graph

Click View Graph to see relationships visually:

What the Colours Mean

Interacting with the Graph

• Click a node to see its details
• Drag nodes to rearrange
• Scroll to zoom in/out
• Double-click to focus on a node

3D Graph View

For complex relationships, try the 3D view:

3D Controls

The RiC Dashboard

Administrators can access the full RiC Dashboard at Admin → RiC Explorer

Searching with RiC

Semantic Search

RiC enables smarter searching:

Traditional search: "Smith mining" → Finds records with those words

Semantic search: "Records created by people involved in mining" → Finds records through relationships, even if "mining" isn't in the text

How to Search

1. Go to RiC Explorer → Search
2. Enter your query
3. Choose search type:

Understanding Entity Types

Records (What we hold)

Agents (Who created/used them)

Activities (What produced them)

Places (Where they're from)

Common Relationships

Cataloguing in RiC-O

RiC is not only a way to view archives - you can describe them in RiC-O directly. On the Add form and the edit form, open the Administration area at the top and set Description standard to Records in Contexts (RiC-O). The fields below reshape into the RiC-O element set, each labelled with the property it maps to (rico:title, rico:identifier, rico:hasRecordSetType, rico:description, and so on).

You can also arrive straight on the RiC-O form:

• Link to /informationobject/add?standard=ric (add &parent=1234 to make it a child of record 1234).
• On any archival record, open the caret beside Add new and choose Add child description in -> RiC-O (Records in Contexts). The new description opens in RiC-O, already parented to that record.

Save writes a proper RiC-O record (source_standard = RiC-O 1.0), and the RiC serialisers pick it up everywhere RiC-O leaves Heratio (below). The holder of a record - rico:hasOrHadHolder - is the Repository you set in the Identity area, so you do not enter it twice.

Instantiations - the copies and carriers

A single archival record can exist as more than one physical or digital thing: the original held in a strongroom, a microfilm surrogate, a digital scan. In RiC-O each of these is an Instantiation (rico:Instantiation).

Open the Instantiations section on the RiC-O form and use Add instantiation to add a row for each manifestation. A row captures:

• Label / title - e.g. "Original held at the National Archives"
• Carrier type - paper, digital, microfilm, photograph, and so on
• MIME / medium
• Extent - a value and a unit (5 boxes, 3 reels, 120 megabytes)
• Location / note

Remove a row with its Remove button. What you enter is stored as a real RiC entity and flows out through every RiC-O export.

Heratio also generates an instantiation automatically for each digital object you upload (its file, MIME type and byte size). Those automatic ones are managed for you and are not shown in this editor - your manual instantiations sit alongside them and never overwrite them.

Events - the record's timeline

Records have datable moments beyond their creation: a transfer of custody, a publication, an accumulation, a reproduction. The Events section (rico:Event) lets you record them.

Add event gives you a row with an event type (Custody, Publication, Accumulation, Reproduction, Distribution and the rest of the RiC event vocabulary), a display date ("circa 1994"), an agent, ISO start and end dates, and a note. Add as many as the record needs; remove any with its button.

Creation itself - who made the record and when - stays in the creators and date fields of the Identity area, so the Events editor is for everything else that happened to the record. Every event you add surfaces in the record's RiC-O date range set.

Choosing the RiC view per record

The View toggle on a record's page - Record (the flat, standard view) versus RiC (the relationship view) - is remembered per record. Set one record to RiC and only that record opens in RiC next time; other records keep their own setting. Earlier, the toggle was a single session-wide switch that flipped every record at once. Now the choice is durable and record-scoped, and it works the same way on descriptions, agents, repositories, functions, accessions and the rest.

RiC-O out of Heratio

Anything you catalogue in RiC-O - including the instantiations and events above - leaves Heratio as standards-compliant RiC-O through three doors:

All three share one serialiser, so they agree with each other, and all three respect the same access rules - a draft or culturally restricted record is not disclosed.

For Researchers

Why RiC Helps Your Research

1. Discover connections you wouldn't find otherwise
2. Understand context - who, what, where, when
3. Find related materials across collections
4. Trace provenance - where records came from

Example Research Journey

Tips for Using RiC

Start broad, then narrow

• Begin with the graph view
• See the big picture
• Click into specific connections

Follow the people

• Agents often link many records
• One person might connect different collections

Check both directions

• Who created this? (look backwards)
• What else did they create? (look forwards)

Use semantic search for complex questions

• "Records about mining created by government"
• "Materials related to Johannesburg before 1900"

Troubleshooting

RiC is based on the ICA Records in Contexts standard (RiC-CM 1.0).

For technical questions, contact your system administrator.