Present: David Caruso, Michelle DiMeo, Anna Headley, Hillary Kativa, Stephanie Lampkin, Cathleen Lu, Sarah Newhouse, 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)?
- Place of creation
- 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)
- Rare Books >
- 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.
- Othermer Library >
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