[MCN-L] Encoded Archival Description in museums
Kenneth Hamma
khamma at me.com
Fri May 15 15:57:48 PDT 2009
Part of this equation has to be that there still are physical
collections with individual objects to be managed. Nearly all of the
difference in cataloging approaches (standards, mechanics, habits,
system support, etc.) has to do with that, but not with the projected
online access, which if separated, as Mary Elings points out, permits
a freedom to manage locally as one sees fit and provide digital access
in as many ways as are beneficial. Multiple distribution channels are
good; just because the physical thing might be a book doesn't mean its
digital record and surrogate must live only in an OPAC. There are
lots of other venues and protocols to be taken advantage of.
ken
Kenneth Hamma
+1 310 270 8008
khamma at me.com
368 Patel Place
Palm Springs CA 92264
On May 15, 2009, at 11:12 AM, Ethan Gruber wrote:
> Günter,
>
> I generally agree with that approach. People tend to think of EAD
> as an
> archival standard, but EAD is well-suited for describing
> "collections" of
> objects of any type--not just manuscripts, photographs, etc., as
> well as the
> individual objects themselves. A lot of museums think in terms of
> individual objects. Since I'm from a library, I tend to have a
> different
> concept of a "collection," and tried a different approach with
> coins. I
> think that out of all of the objects in the University of Virginia Art
> Museum, the coins were organized in the most EAD-compatible way to
> begin
> with. For example, there are about 600 coins the comprise of the
> total
> collection, but within this, the museum has several conceptual
> sub-collections under that, such as "The Mosberg Collection" or the
> "Oliver's Orchard Hoards," which can easily be described as a
> "series" level
> component as part of the <dsc> in EAD. I met someone from the
> University of
> Granada, Spain a few months ago at the Computer Applications in
> Archaeology
> conference who presented on using EAD to describe imagery of
> architectural
> components. It's not that EAD can't be used for museum objects, but
> it
> would require a conceptual re-envisioning of the organization of a
> museum's
> holdings, which may be more trouble than it's worth for most
> institutions.
> VRA Core and CDWA are well-suited for the description of items, but
> I favor
> the robustness of EAD's contextual descriptors.
>
> Mary,
>
> If you are interested in cross-institutional aggregation, I highly
> recommend
> checking out Blacklight -> http://blacklightopac.org/ . It is an
> aggregation index and interface for all University of Virginia Library
> objects, whether it be physical collections like books or CDs, EAD
> finding
> aids, TEI documents, eletronic journals or photograph collections.
> It also
> includes each of the coins from the numismatic project and links
> back to
> their records on the coin website. Stanford's library is the first
> other
> institution to formally adopt blacklight. You can map any metadata
> format
> you can think of to its solr index--EAD, CDWA, MARC, you name it--and
> control how each of those content types is represented in the
> browser. My
> colleagues are doing exactly that for the Northwest Digital Archives
> right
> now. Best of all, it's opensource. I highly encourage you to take
> a look.
> There's a beta at http://virgobeta.lib.virginia.edu/
>
> Ethan
>
>
>
> Addendum: If they would just loosen CDWA up a bit, I might be a
> little more
> interested in using it. Maybe I'm not familiar enough with it yet,
> but is
> there even to regularize names for authority purposes and indexing?
> If I
> encode the obverse and reverse legends of a coin with two Inscription
> elements and want index them separately, it doesn't seem like there
> is a way
> of giving the Inscription an attribute (like "type") that allows me to
> specify which one is obverse or reverse.
>
> On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 1:50 PM, M. Elings <melings at library.berkeley.edu
> >wrote:
>
>> The grid of standards Günter mentioned is focused
>> on the cultural heritage community. While one can
>> argue that you should use the most appropriate
>> data standards for the materials being described,
>> the reality is that many of us are bound by the
>> standards (and tools that work those standards)
>> that facilitate access, such as the case Günter
>> mentions wherein the aggregator only accepted
>> EAD. This is a localized issue but is one that
>> has hampered broader aggregation of resources
>> from LAMs (libraries, archives, and museums),
>> which is one of the reasons -- if I can use the
>> phrase -- the "silos of the LAMs" exist.
>>
>> I have often had the conversation about the need
>> for a community-neutral way to aggregate content
>> from seemingly disparate LAMs for access
>> purposes. And the fact that the solution is not
>> likely to come from any one of those communities
>> but from an uber-organization not invested in the
>> descriptive idiosyncracies our communities have
>> developed. To some extent, a solution has
>> arrived. The Commons on Flickr is providing a way
>> to aggregate content from LAMs for access. While
>> this is not a standards-based solution for
>> describing our content, it is giving us a viable
>> option for getting that description and our
>> content out into the broader "flow" in a way that
>> our community-based access solutions have not.
>> This does not answer the question of which
>> standards are the most appropriate for which
>> materials but it is loosening the grip that access has over that
>> decision.
>>
>> Mary W. Elings
>> Archivist for Digital Collections
>> The Bancroft Library
>> University of California
>> Berkeley, CA 94720-6000
>> melings*library.berkeley.edu
>> Ph 510-643-2273
>> Fx 510-643-2548
>>
>>
>>
>> At 10:13 AM 5/15/2009, Waibel,Guenter wrote:
>>> Ken, I think what you're referring to is the
>>> grid of standards I've often shown in the past,
>>> which comes from an article Mary Elings and I wrote for FirstMonday.
>>>
>>>
>> http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/1628/1543#e9
>>>
>>> The article argues that we may be thinking about
>>> our standards landscape to narrowly. Rather than
>>> thinking about standards which emanated out of
>>> one specific community as only being applicable
>>> to that particular setting, we should think of
>>> it as applying to a specific material type,
>>> which can occur whether you're in a library, archive or museum.
>>>
>>> At the end of the day, I think it all boils down
>>> to this question: which other materials do you
>>> think you're materials should be able to
>>> integrate with? If you think it's books, then
>>> use a bibliographic standards. If you think it's
>>> cultural objects, then use a standard
>>> appropriate for that. If you think it's bulk
>>> materials, then use an archival standard.
>>>
>>> For a typical museum collection with a focus on
>>> individual objects, I wouldn't advocate the use
>>> of EAD as a general solution. MOAC used EAD XML
>>> for two primary reasons: 1. because there was no
>>> XML schema for cultural objects at that point in
>>> time, and 2. because the resource MOAC was
>>> contributing to (the Online Archive of
>>> California) only accepted EAD XML. It was a
>>> pragmatic decision based on specific
>>> circumstances, but now that we have data
>>> exchange standards like CDWA Lite XML, that's
>>> most likely the more appropriate choice for
>>> cultural materials described at an item-level.
>>>
>>> I would also say that for certain types of
>>> collections, museums may benefit from a
>>> collection-level strategy just to get
>>> information about the availability of materials
>>> out there. The natural history community, for
>>> example, created Natural Collections
>>> Descriptions (NCD) for that precise purpose (see
>> http://wiki.tdwg.org/NCD/).
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>>
>>> Günter
>>>
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu
>>> [mailto:mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu] On Behalf Of Kenneth Hamma
>>> Sent: Thursday, May 14, 2009 5:55 PM
>>> To: Museum Computer Network Listserv
>>> Subject: Re: [MCN-L] Encoded Archival Description in museums
>>>
>>> Günter,
>>>
>>> Recalling a talk by you at IMLS in DC a couple of years ago, this
>>> might be a time to talk a bit about cataloging for bibliographic,
>>> unique works and heaps of unique works. And the use of the right
>>> tool
>>> for the right material regardless of the museum - archive - library
>>> designation?
>>>
>>> ken
>>>
>>> Kenneth Hamma
>>>
>>> +1 310 270 8008
>>> khamma at me.com
>>>
>>> 368 Patel Place
>>> Palm Springs CA 92264
>>>
>>> On May 14, 2009, at 10:26 AM, Waibel,Guenter wrote:
>>>
>>>> EAD indeed is rarely used to describe museum collections, but it is
>>>> used frequently in museum archives. The only project I am aware of
>>>> that used EAD to describe museum object collections was Museums and
>>>> the Online Archive of California (MOAC). You'll find a lot of
>>>> documents related to this project at
>>> http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/moac/classic/
>>>> , and a D-Lib article at
>>> http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january03/rinehart/01rinehart.html
>>>> .
>>>>
>>>> Cheers,
>>>>
>>>> Günter Waibel
>>>> OCLC Research
>>>> voice: +1-650-287-2144
>>>> Günter blogs at ... http://www.hangingtogether.org
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu] On
>>>> Behalf
>>>> Of Ethan Gruber
>>>> Sent: Thursday, May 14, 2009 10:05 AM
>>>> To: Museum Computer Network Listserv
>>>> Subject: [MCN-L] Encoded Archival Description in museums
>>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> I'm a developer in a library that deals with a lot of special
>>>> collections
>>>> objects. I've dealt with traditional museum-type objects, such as
>>>> ancient
>>>> coins and the challenges in providing access to them online. I
>>>> used
>>>> Encoded
>>>> Archival Description (EAD) to describe them quite robustly in XML.
>>>> This is
>>>> a fairly standard schema in libraries, and I was wondering to what
>>>> extent
>>>> EAD is used by museums to describe their own collections. I have
>>>> presented
>>>> at two conferences in the last year (Archiving 2008 and Computer
>>>> Applications in Archaeology in 2009) regarding EAD for numismatics,
>>>> and I
>>>> have received a number of comments that suggest EAD is rarely used
>>>> in that
>>>> capacity by museums, especially European ones.
>>>>
>>>> If anyone on this list can offer their insights into EAD in
>>>> museums,
>>>> I would
>>>> appreciate it. For further reference, the project website is:
>>>> http://coins.lib.virginia.edu/ and the documentation section has a
>>>> draft of
>>>> best practices guidelines and the powerpoint presentation I
>>>> recently
>>>> gave.
>>>>
>>>> Ethan Gruber
>>>> University of Virginia Library
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