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

Absent: Erin McLeary, Patrick Shea

Metadata template follow-up

We won't be accepting 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. 

Agreeing on broad / Unified metadata fields and values.

Both in the context of data entry and object access (faceted browsing).

We looked at examples of facets on other websites: 

https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/ 

http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/

http://www.asia.si.edu/collections/edan/american.cfm

http://collections.si.edu/search/

  • 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)?
      • [Cat: If I'm understanding this correctly – I think the best way would be to catalog the location as narrowly as possible, but have the "formerly known" country specified somewhere in the description if the cataloger thinks it is important enough, or even as an additional location entry. Like, entering "Algiers" but also "Ottoman, Empire (1237-1924)" if relevant. Does that make sense? It might be a cataloging guideline question for later, but I think it might also depend on specific examples. The controlled vocab sometimes has former names in 4xx and 5xx related/see also tags, like Armenia and its Soviet Union name, but of course it's not consistently dependable.]
  • 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 curators have?
      • Gregorian vs. Julian calendar [Cat: In terms of current standards, Gregorian is the one used. Would having a display date for other calendars be feasible? Though the conversion seems like it would be a pain... Manual entry might solve that but would it be messy for facets? Anna Headley (Unlicensed)?]
        • [Anna: If we're doing date range faceting, there has to be a date entry in the current / gregorian calendar. Otherwise we're comparing apples to oranges. We should look for good date converter tools people can use while cataloging; if one of them has an API that we could call out to as a service this might be a feature request. Let's talk about this more because I'm not sure I'm understanding the full nuance of all your questions!]
      • Old-style vs. new-style dates (roll-over day is different)
      • French Revolution dates – we usually put in the Gregorian date.
      • Library uses two date fields in MARC: fixed number YYYY and a 260 field for alternatives.
      • Ongoing dates for series
      • Circa? Implication is within a year or two. TEI implication for circa is much broader.
      • 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
    • Othmer 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
      • Othmer library > (? Archives >) Papers and photographs (Ask Patrick)
        • 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

Need to follow-up with Museum (Amanda and Erin) re: Museum types and Collections.

 

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