By Mala Mathur, Product Manager at Getty Digital
The Johnson Publishing Company (JPC) Archive Arches implementation at the Getty holds item-level metadata documenting one of the most significant collections relating to the Black experience in 20th-century America, as recorded by the Johnson Publishing Company, the Chicago-based publisher of Ebony and JET magazines.
In 2019, a consortium of five philanthropic and cultural heritage istitutions purchased the archive for $30 million to preserve it and make it publicly accessible.
Co-owned with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), the JPC Archive contains over 4 million photographs, 5,000 magazines, 10,000 audio and visual recordings, and 200 boxes of business records. This vast resource is a foundation for research, training, publications, interpretive programming, and digital access projects. Getty and NMAAHC are actively processing, digitizing, and organizing the collection. One can explore highlighted items, ongoing research, and related programming through the official Johnson Publishing Company Archive Resource Guide.
Arches plays a pivotal role in the data pipeline architecture for the JPC Archive, serving as one of the collection’s systems of record, alongside a digital asset management system (DAMS) and archival management platform. In this ecosystem, Arches contains descriptive item-level metadata that falls outside typical asset metadata or archival descriptive practice. Arches allows for the growth of a standards-based Linked Art data model as new metadata is produced to enhance discovery of the collection.
The main Linked Art model used in the JPC Archive Arches instance is the Human-made Object model, which serves as a template for JPC resources that are loaded into Arches, for both storage and editorial purposes. Because Arches enforces the Linked Art application profile from the CIDOC CRM ontology, the data is able to be transformed into JSON-LD upon export. This Linked Art-compliant JSON-LD creates a far more interoperable structure for Getty’s linked open data gateway, which in turn powers the JPC Archive discovery layer.
On the editorial side, the JPC Archive Arches instance also takes advantage of the Arches modular reports for enhanced performance and visualization. In addition to the collection metadata, the report also dynamically displays the associated image to provide additional context for editorial staff.
The JPC Archive Arches system is a hosted solution managed by Farallon Geographics.
