Present: Ashley Augustyniak, Michelle DiMeo, Anna Headley, Hillary Kativa, Stephanie Lampkin, Cat Lu,Erin McLeary, Cat Lu, Sarah Newhouse, Daniel Sanford, Patrick Shea,
Absent: Lee Berry, Ron Brashear, David Caruso, Gillian Maguire, Andrea Andrea Tomlinson, Jim Voelkel,
The initial dire note about the migration has been reduced by a short-term solution Anna created. However, we need to address a long-term solution for how we deal with the ordering of data within repeatable fields that have multiple values (such as subject or medium).
A great deal of the boring back-end technical details are not usually discussed with the DCC, but there are aspects of it that can reach up to affect issuesthe front-end.
- Currently the The focus is to have data in Hydra following the linked data model. This requires RDF modeling of metadata about objects.
- RDF models data in uses a flat model without hierarchy, though cultural heritage data has traditionally been presented with hierarchical structure in MARC, XML, etc.
- Hydra pulls in some functionality from code that is maintained by developers in the wider linked data community. These developers have done additional work with RDF that makes has now made an ordering hierarchy difficult.
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Erin did not have strong opinions about how ordering is displayed to users and left Stephanie to make a decision on behalf of the museum decision to be made by Stephanie.
Two sample objects in Hydra were chosen, a stamp and a galvanometer.
- Galvanometer (Museum): The order of entries in the medium field does have meaning. Medium is listed in order of the amount of material used in the object. Pulled from PastPerfect.
- Stamp (Archives): Subjects for the stamp do not have a meaningful order. First entries are from Cat's batch clean-up ingest of the OPAC data and then curators add additional data at the bottom.
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- Subject: No one thought that the order is meaningful. Patrick specifically called out that his order is not hierarchical, and Sarah mentioned adding a forgotten subject to the bottom later. Ashley will talk to Andrea to see if we missed anything with regards to whether any of the OPAC cataloging assumes a hierarchy to the data.
- This field is probably fine with alpha-sort.
- Medium: The order does matter to this field for the Museum objects. Stephanie explained that the order of medium entries represents percentage of object composition. This is valuable for storing and caring for the item.
- A question was raised if this data is best kept in order in Hydra, or if it is of value in the CMS but not in Hydra (different audiences, different purposes).
- Currently this field should have an ordered entry to maintain the hierarchy of data. We can later revisit if alpha-sort would be okay.
- Maker: There was a short discussion if the order of the maker is meaningful to show the relative contribution that different makers had on a work or object (especially when organization names change over time). It might be meaningful in some future cases, but when a sample object was considered everyone agreed that alphabetical would have been fine.
- This field is probably fine with alpha-sort.
- Genre: No one really discussed this – seemed unimportant.
- This field is probably fine with alpha-sort
- Creator: Nobody expressed any issues with this field.
- This field is probably fine with alpha-sort
- Author: This field might have some concerns, an example of scientific journals was brought up where the order of authorship has meaning. Patrick mentioned that those are not a major component of intended Hydra material.
- If Hydra will automatically generate citations, the order of authors will matter because it will generate citations based on the order used in the field. In the future we will have to discuss if this matters enough to be worth the effort modeling things
- This field is probably fine with alpha-sort, unless citation concerns change things.
- Interviewer: This field is will primarily be used by for Oral History data. A meeting is needed We need to have a future conversation with them to determine if order here is meaningful. There is a desire to have Lee previously mentioned that they desired to present oral histories provided with auto-generated citation information.
- Status pending discussion, as Dave and Lee were not present
- Title: This field needs modeling changes. Anna mentioned a primary title and alternate title set of fields. Nobody expressed any concerns with this plan. Cat said only about two items in Hydra had multiple titles and could easily be changed.
- This field will need modeling changes with a single value title field and a multi-value alternate titles field that can be alpha-sorted.
- Description: This field currently is multi-valued. Order does matter here since paragraphs/divisions are handled by entering data in different sections.
- Anna proposed a modeling change where Description would be a single value field with the ability to handle paragraph breaks.
- This covered the needs to use the field. Everyone approved.
- Anna proposed a modeling change where Description would be a single value field with the ability to handle paragraph breaks.
- Series Arrangement: This field, used for Archival Material, does have value in the order of entries. Sarah noted that the notation used to express this (Series, Sub-Series) is already alphabetical however.
- An alpha-sort would preserve the ordering data in this field.
- Anna mentioned it would be more technically correct in a data modeling sense to turn this into multiple fields (Series, Sub-Series). This matters for data exporting since the sorting is at the display level not the triplestore level. Sarah also said the need for some of this is contingent on future work between ArcLight and ArchivesSpace.
Overall, most people were happy with alpha-sort as a solution. Exceptions to various fields were mentioned as possible, though unlikely, and the general consensus was that rare exceptions might be best handled with information added to the description field to clarify matters. Also of note is that Note: a change to a field must be applied across all collections and cannot just be done for the museum for one fielddepartment, but the change to that field would apply to everyone using that field and could be confusing to users if all other fields have alpha-sort. The priority for a request for ordering If curators request ordering for a field it will required changes to the data model and that would have to be considered against other requests for software development that may be of more importance to our collections and users (such as an improved image viewer). The Digital Collections team also plans to do user testing with researchers and the general public to see if the order conveys meaning to them.
Timeline
- The digital collections team will work on the data migration and complete it before the holiday break. We will provide training on the upgraded system once we're back from the holidays in early January.
- The digitization calendar has been completed through December. If you haven't already received a request to fill your queue for December, your next appointment will come in January.
- We will revisit this conversation about alpha-sort in January to make sure that no one has changed their mind or has any additional thoughts.