Oliver Mamo, National Librarian and C.E.O.

The archival finding aid

An information management perspective within the cultural heritage sector

European Regional

Development Fund

Doc. 6F-TS-48 Tutoring Session n.3 – Malta, 13 March 2014

Museums, Libraries & Archives Perspectives

Libraries deal with publications where multiple copies

exist. Publications contain identifiers and focus on a

subject or theme across subjects.

Museums deal with objects having two types of foci being

the physical nature of the object and the intellectual

content of the object.

Archives deal with documents that are generated as part

of a process. Individual documents rarely make sense

on their own but must be contextualised within a group.

Information Seeking Behaviour

The Dervin Model

Situation

Gap

Outcome

Bridge

Information Seeking Behaviour

The Ellis Model

Starting

Chaining

Browsing

Differentiating

Monitoring

Extracting

Information Seeking Behaviour

Case Study – Duff & Johnson (2002)

I.S.B. of historians in the use of archives

Orientation

Known Item Searches

Building Contextual Knowledge

Identification of Relevant Material

Metadata

Structured information that describes, explains,

locates, or otherwise makes it easier to retrieve, use,

or manage an information resource

(National Information Standards Organisation)

Metadata - Purpose

Resource description

Information retrieval

Management of information sources

Documenting ownership and authenticity of digital resources

Interoperability

Haynes (2004)

Metadata - Typology

Metadata structure standards

Metadata content rules

Metadata mark-up standards

Metadata packaging standards

Higgins (2007)

Schema

Sets of metadata elements designed for a specific

purpose, such as describing a particular type of

information resource.

Greenberg (2005)

Schema .

Primary authorship of a publication using MARC21

100 Personal Name

100 $a Name

Element

110 Corporate Bodies

Sub-Element

Schema ..

100 $a Name

Written in the format: Surname, Name (AACR2)

Example: Charles Dickens (Using LCSH)

100 $a Dickens, Charles

100 $d 1812-1870

http://lccn.loc.gov/n85122324

Interoperability

Cultural heritage communities have increasingly made use of vocabularies and other standards as they seek to provide access to information that was previously held in paper files or isolated in local systems. Inspired by the power of online databases and the World Wide Web, professionals in the various art and cultural heritage communities now see the value of efficiently exchanging information with each other

Harpring (2010)

Metadata Crosswalk

CDWA MARC EAD Dublin Core

Creator Author Origination Creator

Object/Work-Type Genre/Form Control Access Genre Form Type

Harpring (2010)

Bibliography

Baca, M. and Harpring, P. (eds.). (2009). Categories for the description of works of art. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Publications.

Baeza-Yates, R. and Ribeiro-Neto, B. (1999). Modern information retrieval. Harlow: Addison-Wesley.

Burke, M. (1999). Organization of multimedia resources: principles and practice of information retrieval. Aldershot: Gower.

Darnell, P. (2004). Arrangement. In (ed.) Wythe, D. Museum archives: an introduction. Chicago, IL: The Society of American Archivists.

Dervin, B. (1992). From the mind’s eye of the user: the sense-making qualitative-quantitative methodology. In Glazier, J. and Powell, R. Qualitative research in information management. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited.

Duff, W. and Johnson, C. (2002). Accidentally Found on Purpose : Information-Seeking Behavior of Historians in Archives. Library quarterly, 72(4), 472-496.

Ellis, D. (1989). A behavioural approach to information retrieval system design. Journal of documentation, 45(3), 171-212.

Fleckner, J. A. (1986). An archivist speaks to the museum profession. Museum news, October-November, 17-25.

Foster, A. (2005). A non-linear model of information seeking behaviour. Information research, 10(2). Retrieved December 13, 2012 from http://informationr.net/ir/10-2/paper222.html#AppendixA

Bibliography . Greenberg, J. (2005). Understanding metadata and metadata schemes. Cataloging classification quarterly, 40(3), 17-36.

Harpring, P. (2010). Introduction to controlled vocabularies: terminology for art, architecture, and other cultural works. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Publications.

Haslhofer, B. and Klas, W. (2010). A survey of techniques for achieving metadata interoperability. ACM computing surveys, 42(2), 1-37.

Haynes, D. (2004). Metadata for information management and retrieval. London: Facet.

Higgins, S. (2006). What are metdata standards? Retrieved October 21, 2012 from http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/briefing-papers/standards-watch-papers/what-are-metadata-standards

Higgins, S. (2007). Using metdata standards. Retrieved October 21, 2012 from http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/briefing-papers/standards-watch-papers/using-metadata-standards

International Council on Archives (2000). ISAD(G): General international standard archival description (2nd ed.). Ottawa: International Council on Archives.

International Council on Archives (2003). ISAAR (CPF): International standard archival authority record for corporate bodies, persons and families (2nd ed.). Canberra: International Council on Archives.

Lewis, G. (1984). Museums and their precursors: a brief world survey. In Thompson J.M.A. Manual of curatorship: a guide to museum practice. London: Butterworth Heinemann.

Bibliography .. Library of Congress. Library of Congress authorities. Retrieved August 15, 2012 from http://authorities.loc.gov

Library of Congress. Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870. Retrieved August 15, 2012 from http://lccn.loc.gov/n78087607

Library of Congress (2012). MARC standards. Retrieved August 1, 2012. Retrieved from http://www.loc.gov/marc/

Meyer, E. (2011). Splashes and ripples: synthesizing the evidence on the impacts of digital resources. Joint Information Systems Committee JISC Report.

Nilsson, M. (2010). From interoperability to harmonization in metadata standardization - designing an evolvable framework for metadata harmonization. Retrieved August 1, 2012 from http://kmr.nada.kth.se/papers/SemanticWeb/FromInteropToHarm-MikaelsThesis.pdf

Przybyla, A. M. (2004). The museum archives movement. In (ed.) Wythe, D. Museum archives: an introduction. Chicago, IL: The Society of American Archivists.

Rowley, J. and Hartley, R. (2008). Organizing knowledge: an introduction to managing access to information. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Schaffner, J. (2009). The metadata is the interface: better description for better discovery of archives and special collections, synthesized from user studies. Dublin, OH, OCLC Research.

The Joint Steering Committee for revision of AACR (1998). Anglo-American cataloguing rules (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: American Library Association.

Bibliography … Usherwood, B. (2005). Relevant repositories of public knowledge?: libraries, museums and archives in 'the

information age'. Journal of librarianship and information science, 37(2), 89-98.

Woodley, M. (2008). Crosswalks, metadata harvesting, federated searching, metasearching: using metadata to

connect users and information. In Baca, M. Introduction to metadata. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Publications.

Wythe, D. (2004). Museum archives: an introduction. Chicago, IL: The Society of American Archivists.

Thank you

Oliver Mamo National Librarian & CEO Malta Libraries | The National Library of Malta | Old Treasury Street, Valletta VLT 1410 * email: oliver.mamo@gov.mt ( Office: +356 21234797 7 Fax: +356 21235992