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International Metadata Initiatives: Lessons in Bibliographic Control

Caplan, Priscilla (2000) International Metadata Initiatives: Lessons in Bibliographic Control . In Proceedings Conference on Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium, Washington.

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Abstract

The decade of the 1990s saw the development of a proliferation of metadata element sets for resource description. This paper looks at a subset of these metadata schemes in more detail: the TEI header, EAD, Dublin Core, and VRA Core. It looks at why they developed as they did, major points of difference from traditional (AACR2/MARC) library cataloging, and what advantages they offer to their user communities. It also discusses challenges to implementers of these schemes and possible future developments. It goes on to identify some commonalties among these cases, and to attempt to generalize from these some lessons for developers of metadata element sets. It concludes by suggesting we also look carefully at emerging schemes being developed by publishers in support of electronic commerce and rights management, and think seriously about the implications of commodity metadata upon our traditional bibliographic apparatus.

EPrint Type:Conference Paper
Keywords:Bibliographic Control,TEI,EAD,DCMES,VRA,Web resources, metadata schemes
Subjects:Knowledge Structures
Cataloging
Metadata
ID Code:584
Deposited On:08 April 2005
Alternative Locations:http://www.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/caplan_paper.html
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NOTES

This paper will use the term "traditional cataloging" to refer to resource description based on a suite of rules including ISBD, AACR2, LC rule interpretations, LC name authority, and the MARC formats for bibliographic data. I do this not to reflect a value judgement for or against traditional cataloging, but only because some short-hand term is needed.

"It is the intention of the developers, however, to ensure that the information required for a catalogue record be retrievable from the TEI file header, and moreover that the mapping from one to the other be as simple and straightforward as possible." C.M. Sperberg-McQueen and Lou Burnard, eds., Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (TEI P3) (Chicago; Oxford : Text Encoding Initiative, c1994.) p.137. http://www.uic.edu/orgs/tei/p3/.

Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access, Task Force on Metadata and the Cataloging Rules. Final Report. August 21, 1998. http://www.ala.org/alcts/organization/ccs/ccda/tf-tei2.html.

TEI/MARC "Best Practices", November 25, 1998 Draft. http://www.lib.umich.edu/libhome/ocu/teiguide.html.

International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records: Final Report. September 1997. http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr1.htm#1

Kathleen Burnett, Kwong Bor Ng and Soyeon Park. "A comparison of the two traditions of metadata development." Journal of the American Society for Information Science 50(13):1209-1217, 1999.

Daniel V. Pitti. "Encoded Archival Description: An Introduction and Overview." D-Lib Magazine, 5(11) November 1999. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november99/11pitti.html

Actually there are three sections; an optional section can be included to supply a more "publisher-friendly" title page than the header provides.

You can almost hear the surprised delight in early testimonials to the EAD, such as this quote from a talk by Susan von Salis, Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, to the RLG Forum in Toronto, 1997. "As I mentioned, most finding aids include common components such as provenance, scope and contents, and access restrictions. So..... the DTD includes these 'parts' as its elements! Markup itself is simply a matter of wrapping the correct tags around the proper text." http://www.lib.umb.edu/newengarch/InternetResources/vonsalisrlg/index.html

Report of the Emerging Descriptive Standards Group, Southeastern Archives and Records Conference, Columbia SC, May 23-25, 1999. http://www.state.sc.us/scdah/sarc41999.htm

MacKenzie Smith. "DFAS: The Distributed Finding Aid Search System." D-Lib Magazine, 6(1) January 2000. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january00/01smith.html

Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information. Guide to Best Practice: Dublin Core, version 1.1, April 2000. Available from http://www.cimi.org/standards/index.html#FIVE.

Renato Iannella and Rachel Heery. Dublin Core Metadata Initiative - Structure and Operation. April 1999. http://purl.org/dc/about/DCMIStructure-19990531.htm

Lynda S. White. "Creating the VRA Core: The Critical Issues." VRA Bulletin, v.25, no.4 (Winter 1998), p. 34-40.

Marcia Lei Zeng. "Metadata Elements for Object Description and Representation: A Case Report from a Digitized Historical Fashion Collection Project". Journal of the American Society for Information Science 50(13):1193-1208, 1999.

Bernhard Eversburg summarized the principle of 1:1 with the following verse:

Make metadata one to one,

just one per item, is the task.

Rather less,

more's a mess!

"But what's an item", now you ask?

If that's in doubt, do none.

http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/dc-general/1999-04/0117.html Nonetheless, after extensive debate over whether Ansel Adams or the scanning technician is the Creator of a digitized Adam's photo, the answer appears to be that the Creator is in the eyes of the beholder.

International Council on Archives. ISAAR(CPF): International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families. Ottawa : The Secretariat of the ICA Ad Hoc Commission on Descriptive Standards, 1996. http://dobc.unipv.it/obc/add/infap/archdes/isaar_e.html

ONIX International Version 1.01. http://www.editeur.org/onixfiles.html

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