Descriptive Standards and Applications in Memory Institutions

Editor's Notes

• #2: silos! silos of doom!
• #3: Center v. Met chief differences   - size   - cataloging team (jen and volunteers at center, lots of teams at met)   - cms To ascertain the practical applications of standards, we have evaluated two institutions’ implementation of standards, the Center for Book Arts and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.     Each organization illustrates different approaches to the application of  standards.
• #4: Final report release Feb 2010 COBOAT developed by Cogapp! Still useful to institutions since CDWA Lite isn't neccessarily built in to TMS. OAICatMuseum harvests via OAI-PMH Data analysis and compliance with CDWA Lite/CCO ny institutions - mma also v&a, national gallery, yale, harvard, princeton, cleveland, nat'l gallery canada      A relatively small number (10 out of 131, or 7.6%) of elements/attributes are used at least once by all nine museums.  Do queries across the research aggregation return meaningful results? How does the lack of subject data impact the research aggregation?
• #5: tuck -  her cco argument is that cco isn't widely used in museum -- capturing 'tombstone' information in collections instead of descriptive metadata for access and discovery fields in tms and other systems are 'labels' "The issues encountered in matching values from museum contributors to controlled vocabularies were semantic mismatches (false hits), matches prevented by concatenated or deviantly structured data, and multiple matches.  In summary, the vocabulary matching exercise indicates that in order to preserve the possibility of extending museum data with the rich information available in thesauri, even knowing the source thesaurus would have been only marginally helpful. Performing some data processing on the museum data could have created higher match rates. However, the value of using controlled vocabularies for search optimization or data enrichment can only be fully realized if the termsourceID is captured alongside termSource to establish a firm lock on the appropriate vocabulary term."" - waibel quote source Source:  Tuck, E. (2011). Putting the wagon before the horse? A critical evaluation of museum standards and systems from the standpoint of interoperability and information retrieval. [Forthcoming, VRA Bulletin]. Retrieved from http://www.emilytuck.com/CCO_TMS_Article.pdf. img src  http://www.vraweb.org/seiweb/readings-prep/Herding%20Cats_CCO_%20XML_and_theVRA_Core_Eklund.pdf
• #6: in looking at how cultural heritage institutions deal with metadata we'll start with collection management systems CBA uses CA Met uses TMS
• #7: "CollectiveAccess is a highly configurable cataloguing tool and web-based application for museums, archives and digital collections. Available free of charge under the GPL open-source license, it requires little to no custom programming to support a variety of metadata standards , external data sources and repositories, as well as most popular media formats." http://www.collectiveaccess.org/about/overview  Pawtucket = front end Providence = back end (database, cataloging interface)
• #8: CA supports these standards and can also be configured to work with others based on an institutions needs This is a sample image of cataloging interface for entering basic info
• #9: CBA selected CA as their collection mgmt system primarily because it was free to use under an open-source GPL license and proprietary applications were too expensive to acquire and maintain   at an added cost, the back end database and cataloging interface, as well as the front end were customized to CBA's needs   sample record from CBA catalog background:  3 collections based on types of materials: Fine Art, Archives, and Reference interviewed Jen Larson, Collections Specialist Use of standards Qualified Dublin Core choice made as one-size fits all approach to cataloging diverse array of materials in holdings no content standards, but plan to use DACS for archival materials in future use value standards such as Getty AAT, an LCSH looking at sample record from CBA catalog object type  in-house controlled vocab creator various roles custom fields created free text field physical descriptions techniques used in making the object relationships to other objects and entities within the collection
• #10: source: http://www.gallerysystems.com/tms relational database - multiple tables that can link to one another
• #11: Established under Philippe de Montebello  during 1970s Central Catalog - graveyard of records, but shows how there was once an insittution wide department responsible for standards Each curatorial department has its own standards CCO -- "cco's a bit heavy. that's the thing. the reason that nobody uses cidoc is that they're so huge. dublin core is so small and so lightweight, but then you get the semantics problem. if you have a small enough collection, and you have people from the start using something like cco, but you'd probably be the only one, so you wouldn't have anyone to share with. you'd introduce more ambiguity, but you'd get more cross-institutional sort of bias... " - piotr
• #12: 6 hours! Styled with css and xml namespace formatting 'Spaghetti code' Unified tms will just publish changes Kiosks and DAM also pull from TMS, but don't give information 'back' to TMS; one-way walk of information available on website and somewhat on google art project...  Piotr Online Collection Database screencapture illustrating differences in museum cataloging within the MMA and across departments. 1. Dates are formatted in wildly different formats (ca., date range, date range with pluralization, question mark). 2. Titles are descriptive but may or may not appear within brackets, making it unclear where the title has been derived from; title case is applied in some departments but not others. 3. No artists listed in the final two examples, where CCO recommends the application of Unknown (Culture) in such cases.
• #13: An object is cataloged using widely accepted and used standards: Structural: CDWA/CDWA Lite, Dublin Core Content: CCO, DACS Value: AAT, ULAN, LCSH   Interoperability database software should be able to export data in XML format for harvesting using OAI-PMH Online and shared access: data can be accessed by aggregators and union catalogs
• #14: The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a low-barrier mechanism for repository interoperability.   From OAForum:  "OAI-PMH supports any metadata format encoded in XML. Dublin Core is the minimal format specified for basic interoperability."  
• #16: Current obstacle is      no US based governing body     american association of museums does not have same degree of specificity in its accreditation     Europe - SPECTRUM operations standard SPECTRUM consists of both procedures and information requirements in 21 different activities " SPECTRUM  is embedded in the Accreditation Scheme as part of its minimum documentation requirement for UK museums. This is drawn from the 8 SPECTRUM 'primary' procedures - i.e. those with which every museum must comply, in order to ensure that they have a basic, accountable, documentation system." Source: http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/index.cfm/collection-management/standards/ " 4.3 Maintenance of the primary documentation procedures as  defi ned by SPECTRUM 4.3.1 SPECTRUM: The UK Museum Documentation Standard (produced by  mda) is the nationally accepted standard for documentation and it enables  museums to fulfi l their fundamental responsibilities for collections and the  information associated with them.  4.3.2 The Accreditation Standard is drawn from the SPECTRUM Minimum  Standard for the Primary Procedures listed below. Fuller information about  these procedures is given in Appendix 7 and each procedure is defi ned in  detail in SPECTRUM." http://www.mla.gov.uk/~/media/Files/pdf/2008/Accreditation_Standard CHIN: "This important work began with the national inventory of museum objects in the 1970s. It continued with CHIN’s support of national museums in the 1980s and the introduction of Web access to professional resources in the 1990s."
• #17: Living thing --     curators, registrars, librarians, scholars, visitors - everyone uses it to find what they need even when they aren't aware of it     mismatched fields - using fields differently