ronald milne

42
Weimar 23 November 2005 Ronald Milne Collection Description: Why, and Whither?

Upload: edison

Post on 11-Jan-2016

69 views

Category:

Documents


2 download

DESCRIPTION

Collection Description: Why, and Whither?. Ronald Milne. Collection Description. The concept is not new Archivists have been compiling collection descriptions of archival collections for many years (fonds level description) - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

TRANSCRIPT

Page 1: Ronald Milne

Weimar 23 November 2005

Ronald Milne

Collection Description:

Why, and Whither?

Page 2: Ronald Milne

Collection Description

• The concept is not new

• Archivists have been compiling collection descriptions of archival collections for many years (fonds level description)

• Item descriptions might be preferred in the library world, but collection descriptions also have considerable value

• What is a collection?

Page 3: Ronald Milne

What is a collection?

The term “collection” can be applied to:

• Any aggregation of physical or digital items

May include manuscripts, archival material, printed books, CDs, digital surrogates of physical items, collections of ‘born digital’ material …

Page 4: Ronald Milne

Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP)

• A £30M funding programme for UK university libraries with research collections; financed by the four UK Higher Education Funding Councils (1998 – 2002)

• Promoted collaborative work among research libraries, mainly within higher education but also with the national libraries and other libraries with research collections

• Attempted to promote a holistic view of library and archive activity throughout the UK

• Funded circa 50 collaborative projects mainly dealing with traditional library materials, but in almost every case creating an electronic resource.

• Outputs included: bibliographic and archival records, collection descriptions, digitised images and texts, web directories and portals

Page 5: Ronald Milne

Collection description – why?• Guides to special collections already available in print form: eg

Bloomfield's Directory of rare books and special collections in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland

Page 6: Ronald Milne

Collection description – why?

• Why not put such a guide on the web?

• Seemed a simple idea, but complexities soon crept in

• RSLP focus groups agreed that collection level descriptions for print collections would be a good idea

• Increase in inter-disciplinary academic work

• Faculty focused on one particular subject may not be so well acquainted with other subject areas

Page 7: Ronald Milne

Collection description – why?

• General public also interested in collections

• Apart from discovering the collections and checking on their content one could, for example:

– Check in advance to avoid unfruitful visits to libraries/archives

– Check to learn about restrictions on materials

Page 8: Ronald Milne

Development of RSLP Collection Description work

• Important to describe collections in a consistent and machine-readable way

• Talked to archivists – made clear that we were not seeking to push out ISAD(G)/EAD

• Archival profession very supportive

• UK Office for Library Networking (UKOLN) had already undertaken work using RSLP and OCLC funding: Michael Heaney’s Analytical model of collections and their catalogues, available through: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/rslp/model/

• RSLP collection description schema developed: a structured set of metadata attributes, for describing collections in the RSLP projects (based on Heaney’s analytical model)

• UKOLN developed a tool that projects could use

• Collection Description Focus set up at UKOLN (June 2001 - )

Page 9: Ronald Milne

RSLP Collection description model (simplified view)

See: www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/rslp/schema

See also: Powell, Heaney and Dempsey: RSLP Collection Description D-Lib Magazine September 2000. <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september00/powell/09powell.html>

Page 10: Ronald Milne
Page 11: Ronald Milne
Page 12: Ronald Milne
Page 13: Ronald Milne

Collection description gathers pace

• A number of RSLP-funded projects used the schema and the tool

and the RSLP schema became the emerging or ‘de facto’ standard

• Adopted by the UK New Opportunities Fund for collection

description within the projects it funded

• RSLP fields mapped onto ISAD (G)

• Schema now normally used with any SQL-compliant relational

database, using a webform for data entry

• (Typically) output is XML

Page 14: Ronald Milne

Collection Description Projects• Various approaches:

– Discipline based

• [eg: Mapping Asia (Humanities and Social Sciences collections relating to Asia, the Middle East and North Africa), Backstage (Performing Arts), Cecilia (Music), EGIL (Icelandic Studies), Revelation (Theology), Genesis (Women’s Studies)

– Regional

• [eg: RASCAL (Northern Ireland), Mapio Cymru (Wales)]

– National

• [eg Cornucopia (UK)]

– International

• MICHAEL (Italy, France, UK)

Page 15: Ronald Milne
Page 16: Ronald Milne
Page 17: Ronald Milne
Page 18: Ronald Milne
Page 19: Ronald Milne
Page 20: Ronald Milne
Page 21: Ronald Milne
Page 22: Ronald Milne
Page 23: Ronald Milne
Page 24: Ronald Milne
Page 25: Ronald Milne
Page 26: Ronald Milne
Page 27: Ronald Milne
Page 28: Ronald Milne
Page 29: Ronald Milne
Page 30: Ronald Milne
Page 31: Ronald Milne
Page 32: Ronald Milne
Page 33: Ronald Milne
Page 34: Ronald Milne
Page 35: Ronald Milne
Page 36: Ronald Milne
Page 37: Ronald Milne
Page 38: Ronald Milne

Collection description: some issues• Issues relating to metadata standards – considerable progress made

towards standardisation (NISO draft standard)

• Taxonomies/subject indexing – clear that this is necessary within a particular collection description project, but how do you conduct a metasearch when different thesauri are used in different projects? Use a common thesaurus (eg UNESCO Thesaurus)?

• Decision on common name authority would also be helpful

• In cross domain projects there are sometimes different emphases – museums concerned with format type, libraries with named collections – an issue?

• How does one measure collection strength and collection quality? (Conspectus? iCAS software)

• How do you know what collection descriptions are available?

• Collection description not necessarily embedded as core work task for print collections, therefore how does one FUND this activity?

Page 39: Ronald Milne

Collection description: whither?

• RSLP schema forms the basis of the Dublin Core Collection Description Application Profile (DC CD AP)

• NISO Metasearch Initiative has published draft standards for trial use - largely DC CD AP, with minor differences

• Accessing Collection Descriptions possible via structured network services protocols:

– Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI PMH)

– Search Retrieve Web (SRW) for distributed searching

• UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Information Environment Service Registry Project (IESR) and National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded OCKHAM project

Page 40: Ronald Milne
Page 41: Ronald Milne
Page 42: Ronald Milne

Ronald MilneActing Director of University Library

Services & Bodley’s Librarian

[email protected]

+44 (0) 1865 287107