DESCRIPTIVE STANDARDS AND APPLICATIONS IN MEMORY
INSTITUTIONS:
Evaluating Metadata Practices in Cultural Heritage Collections
Erin Murphy and Kat SavagePratt Institute
LIS670 Cultural Heritage: Description and AccessDr. Cristina Pattuelli, Spring 2011
Introduction
• How is metadata created, used, and shared in museums and archives?
• It is clear from the literature that data structure and content
standards may not be as widely adopted as they should be for interoperability.
• Practical application of standards was evaluated at two institutions:
The Center for Book Arts
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Museum Data Exchange
• 9 participating institutionso 887,572 contributed records
• Conversion of data to CDWA Lite records using COBOAT
• OAICatMuseum harvests via OAI-PMH
• What is the field's state of compliance with CCO? Use of CDWA Lite required/highly
recommended elements by percentage
Source: Waibel, G., LeVan, R. & Washburn, B. (2010). Museum data exchange: Learning how to share. Retrieved from http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2010/2010-02.pdf.)
Museum Data Exchange"Descriptive cataloging as envisioned by CCO—making collections more accessible to researchers—has little to do with the traditional mission of the museum, and this is the main reason why, many years after the publication of CCO, museum systems and museum standards still don’t match up." -- Emily Tuck, 2011
CCO/VRA Core vision: Systems reality:
Source: http://www.emilytuck.com/CCO_TMS_Article.pdf.
Image sources: http://www.vraweb.org/seiweb/readings-prep/Herding%20Cats_CCO_%20XML_and_theVRA_Core_Eklund.pdf and http://www.gallerysystems.com/tms-demo
Institutions
Collection Management Systems
CollectiveAccess• Open-source web-based software developed by
Whirl-i-Gig • Pawtucket component of CA handles the web
publishing side of the package, and supports full-text search, faceted browsing, social web interaction.
Cataloging in CollectiveAccess
• Support for data structure standards: Dublin Core, SPECTRUM, PBCore, MARC, VRACore, and more
• Supports data content standards: CCO, DACS• Plug-ins available for external data sources (LCSH, AAT)
CBA's Use of CollectiveAccess
Source: A Dictonary Story by Sam Winston, Center for Book Arts
The Museum System (TMS)
• Several modules for object data, exhibitions, location tracking, provenance, and more
• Proprietary data structure - can be exported to CDWA Lite • Prevalent use in the museum and gallery community
• 19 curatorial departmentso Moving toward merger of all 19 TMS databases to 1
institution-wide TMS
The Met's use of TMS
Publishing data at the Met
• Data is pushed nightly to the website and is a complete republishing of all 19 TMS databases
• Evidence of different standards across curatorial departments is clear in the Collections Database
Source: http://www.metmuseum.org/works_of_art/collection_database/
Ideal Scenario for Creating Shareable Metadata
structure
content
value
OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH)"OAI-PMH, a data exchange standard, allows sharing the resulting record. The protocol supports machine-to-machine communication about collections of records, including retrieval from a content provider’s server by an OAI-PMH harvester. It also supports synchronizing local updates with the remote harvester as the museum data evolves (Elings and Waibel 2007)."
Source: Open Archives Forum
Elings, M. & Waibel, G. (2007, Spring). Metadata for all: Descriptive standards and metadata sharing across cultural heritage communities. Visual Resources Association Bulletin, 34(1), 7-14.
Creating Shareable Metadata• Goal:
o Allowing cultural heritage collections to be discovered, accessed and studied in manner that meets both the casual user's expectations of nigh-instant gratification, as well as the scholar's needs for high quality, authoritative information.
Source: http://www.googleartproject.com
How to get there
• Oversight by an independent governing body
• United Kingdom: Museum accreditation requires use of SPECTRUM
• Canada: Virtual Museum and Artefacts Canada
Source: http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/ / http://www.chin.gc.cn/
Conclusion
• Creation at the institution should be guided by standards for structure and content
• Data that follows standards allows it to be easily manipulated by existing and emerging technologies
• A governing body needs to place incentives on selecting and advising on standards selection and use
