A theme of my last few years has been enabling the increased discoverability of Cultural Heritage resources by making the metadata about them more open and consumable.
Much of this work has been at the libraries end of the sector but I have always have had an eye on the broad Libraries, Archives, and Museums world, not forgetting Galleries of course.
Two years ago at the LODLAM Summit 2015 I ran a session to explore if it would be possible to duplicate in some way the efforts of the Schema Bib Extend W3C Community Group which proposed and introduced an extension and enhancements to the Schema.org vocabulary to improve its capability for describing bibliographic resources, but this time for archives physical, digital and web.
Interest was sufficient for me to setup and chair a new W3C Community Group, Schema Architypes. The main activity of the group has been the creation and discussion around a 
straw-man proposal for adding new types to the Schema.org vocabulary.
Not least the discussion has been focused on how the concepts from the world of archives (collections, fonds, etc.) can be represented by taking advantage of the many modelling patterns and terms that are already established in that generic vocabulary, and what few things would need to be added to expose archive metadata to aid discovery.
Coming up next week is LODLAM Summit 2017, where I have proposed a session to further the discussion on the proposal.
So why am I now suggesting that there maybe an opportunity for the discovery of archives and their resources?
In web terms for something to be discoverable it, or a description of it, needs to be visible on a web page somewhere. To take advantage of the current structured web data revolution, being driven by the search engines and their knowledge graphs they are building, those pages should contain structured metadata in the form of Schema.org markup.
Through initiatives such as ArchivesSpace and their application, and ArcLight it is clear that many in the world of archives have been focused on web based management, search, and delivery views of archives and the resources and references they hold and describe. As these are maturing it is clear that the need for visibility on the web is starting to be addressed.
So archives are now in a great place to grab the opportunity to take advantage of the benefits of Schema.org to aid discovery of their archives and what they contain. At least with these projects, they have the pages on which to embed that structured web data, once a consensus around the proposals from the Schema Architypes Group has formed.
I call out to those involved with the practical application of systems for the management, searching, and delivery of archives to at least take a look at the work of the group and possibly engage on a practical basis, exploring the potential and challenges for implementing Schema.org.
So if you want to understand more behind this opportunity, and how you might get involved, either join the W3C Group or contact me direct.
*Image acknowledgement to The Oberlin College Archives