Page Comparison

Present: Lee Berry, David Caruso, Michelle DiMeo, Anna Headley, Hillary Kativa, Stephanie Lampkin, Cathleen Lu, Sarah Newhouse, Patrick Shea, Andrea Tomlinson, Jim Voelkel

Absent: Lee Berry, Erin McLeary, Patrick Shea

Metadata template follow-up

We won't be accept data until our production infrastructure (cloud set-up) is in place. Once that is in place, we can ask curators to begin testing the metadata template. We will 

Agreeing on broad / Unified metadata fields and values.

Both in the context of data entry and object access (faceted browsing). We look at examples of facets on other websites.

• Topic
• Place - Usually topic, not publisher.
  • Jim: should be different depending on the type of object
  • Should topics / publication places be lumped together or separated?
• Dates
  • Sliders vs. start / end input boxes
  • eras or decades vs. specific years
• Format
  • Type
  • Genre
• Collection
  • How nested?
• Culture
• Rights-faceting

Comments

• Lee: alphabetical browsing (names, especially) will be important
• Place
  • Place of creation
    • Unlikely that Jim will have this
  • Topical place
    • Unlikely that Jim will have this
    • Generally difficult to provide
  • Place of publication
    • Of interest, research-wise, e.g. someone wants books published in Neuremburg between 1650-1680
    • Photographs: not relevant except for studio portraits; not super interesting.
    • Etchings and engravings usually have this.
  • Note that countries may change for a specific place – Should we try to control this? Cat Lu (Unlicensed)?
• Date
  • Date of origin that displays with different labels depending on the collection / format (which?)
  • Unknown dates? Date ranges?
  • Interviews take place over a number of dates, so would need to be
  • Date default YYYY-MM-DD
    • Can be truncated as far as YYYY
    • What alternatives do have
    • Gregorian vs. Julian calendar
    • Old-style vs. new-style dates (roll-over day is different)
    • French Revolution dates – we usually put in the Gregorian date.
    • Ongoing dates for series
    • Circa? Implication is within a year or two.
    • Facet based on year, but display the most specific day we have.
• Defaults: There should be a reasonable default for unknown, but required, values.
  • Distinction between Unknown / anonymous
  • Distinction between Unknown / no date
• Collections / nesting
  • Othermer Library >
    • Rare Books >
      • Neville Collection
      • Not-Neville (there are other named collections but we only use them internally)  – "Othmer Rare Books"
      • There's no manuscript collection (they have a 'rare books' mat type; we don't use any fixed field to determine manuscript. we only use a genre field for this)
  • What collections do have that are cross-division?
    • E.g. there are some interviews that are collected by oral histories as part of the beckman project (but note these are not actually part of the oral histories collection)
  • Can collection labels be different depending on the collection itself? e.g. Folder > subfolder
    • Need to deal with this at the Finding aid level?
  • oral histories
    • PEW
    • Women in Science
    • Mass Spec
    • TOSCA
    • Atmospheric science
    • more?
  • Photo archives
    • Using the photos to represent the papers
    • Othermer library > (? Archives >) Papers and photographs
      • Obviously genre will be applied
  • Museum
    • Currently have a false division between objects and instruments that they don't want anymore. This can be put into a genre if desired, but pulled out of the collections hierarchy.
    • Objects, Archives, Props, (?Fine art > Paintings, works on paper, Fischer Collection, Edelman Collection)
  • Include a "general collection" box under each division.

Web Taxonomies - do we want to keep them?

• Scientific eras
  • Not a useful distinction in oral histories or photographs
  • Too interpretive
  • Museum – need to think about this (? to follow up)
• Keywords – free text? Discipline, topics drop menus? Defined list of tags?
  • Follow up.
  • Lee – don't know how I would use these. They are too general.
  • No enthusiasm for free tagging was expressed.

Genres – Should we start with an agreed-upon set of terms, or an open field which would allow any term from any thesaurus?

• Oral histories
• Photographs
  • In record, more detail is desired for display

Types

• Text
• Audio
• Moving Image
• Printed Material

Example websites

• digitalcommonwealth.org
• digitalcollections.nypl.org
• collections.si.edu
• asia.si.edu