The On These Grounds descriptive model is designed to represent the lived experiences of enslaved people who labored for colleges and universities. It consists of four record types that work together to complete the model.
- The Event Record is at the heart of the model and provides the ability to fully describe the details of events in which enslaved people participated.
- The Person Record is designed to capture the biographical details of the enslaved people who appear in the archival record, as well as Free Blacks, and a host of white people who are party to the events being described.
- The Organization Record provides a way to represent entities that might be involved in these events such as schools, churches, religious orders, businesses, or corporations.
- The Place Record provides a way to represent the location of events.
In addition to the record types, the model also includes a set of controlled vocabularies to standardize the classification of events and to facilitate searching and browsing of records. The descriptive model has been designed to optimize interoperability with the Enslaved project.
The current version of the model is v.1.1.