Visual Materials: Metadata, Standards, and Best Practices for Digital Libraries

1
Visual Materials Metadata, Standards, and Best
Practices for Digital Libraries

• Howard Besser
• UCLA School of Education Information
• http//www.gseis.ucla.edu/howard

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Metadata for Digital Libraries-

• Models for Digital Libraries
• Importance of Metadata Standards
• Types and Uses of Metadata
• Discovery Metadata The Dublin Core
• Administrative and Structural Metadata The
  Making of America II Project
• Longevity Metadata
• Identification/Provenance
• The 4/99 NISO/DLF Image Metadata Workshop
• Various other Metadata

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Key problems were facing

• Discovery
• Longevity-
• Interoperability-

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Serious Longevity Problems

• What we know from prior widespread digital file
  formats
• Images separating from their metadata
• Inaccessibility of software needed to view an
  image
• Inability to even decode the file format of an
  image

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Traditional Digital Library Model
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Ideal Digital Library Model
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For Interoperability Digital Libraries Need
Standards

• Discovery Metadata for finding
• Administrative Metadata for viewing and
  maintaining
• Structural Metadata for navigation
• ... IP Rights Management Metadata for controlling
  access...

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Why are Standards and Metadata consensus
important?

• Managing digital files over time
• Longevity
• Interoperability
• Veracity
• Recording in a consistent manner
• Will give vendors incentive to create
  applications that support this

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Why Standards?

• Why do we need a standards?
• To make information universally available to
  users
• facilitate sharing and interchange of
  information
• To preserve information (make it safe from
  changes in hardware and software)
• Standards are the work of communities
• They are necessary so that communities can work.

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Why are you Managing this Information?

• Organizational mission type
• Users
• Uses

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Questions to Ask

• What communities is this standard designed for?
• What type of information is this standard
  designed to handle?
• What functions is this standard designed to
  serve?
• What previous standards is it built upon?
• Does the standard prescribe how to create new
  records (or parts of records), or how to map from
  existing records?
• How far does the standard go? Semantics Does it
  define element sets? Rules? Syntax?-

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What is Metadata

• Structured data describing other data used to
  find or help manage information resources
• Aids in interoperability
• Titles, dates, captions, cataloging and indexing
  data, file headers, rights info, provenance, code
  books, transaction logs, ...
• One persons metadata is anothers data

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Sorting through the Standards Morass

• Data Structures (DC, CDWA, MARC, VRA Core, TEI,
  EAD, MESL data dict)
• Data Interchange (Z39.50)
• Data Values/vocabularies (LCSH, AAT, ULAN, TGN)
• Data Content/syntax (AACR2)

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Semantics/Syntax/Structure

• Semantics
• meaning, as defined by a community to meet their
  particular needs (DC)
• Syntax
• a systematic arrangement of data elements for
  machine processing
• facilitates the exchange and use of metadata
  among various applications (HTML, XML, RDF)
• Structure
• a formal arrangement of the syntax with the goal
  of consistent representation of the semantics
  (rules defining field contents like 1/11/99)

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What is MetadataTypes Uses

• lots of different ways of dividing the clusters

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Uses of Metadata

• Discovery Retrieval
• Identification/Provenance
• Rights Management
• Viewing
• Integrity
• Longevity
• Content rating

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Types of Metadata

• Descriptive
• Discovery Retrieval
• Structural
• Administrative
• Intellectual
• Other Metadata

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Metadata -- Detailed Types

• Identification metadata
• Instance or Fixation metadata
• Source image metadata
• Content metadata
• Subject metadata
• Form and format metadata

• Context metadata
• Structure metadata
• Relationships metadata
• Terms Conditions metadata
• Use history metadata

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Containers and Packages of MetadataWarwick, not
MARC

• modular
• overlapping
• extensible
• community-based
• designed for a networked world to aid commonality
  btwn communities while still providing full
  functionality within each community

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Some different schemes where Metdata is kept

• embedded withing the object (HTML tags)
• in a separate related DB maintained by same
  organization (OPAC, MOA II)
• in a separate DB maintained by a separate
  organization (Books in Print, ratings systems)
• derived on-the-fly from a different scheme
  (MARC-to-DC)

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Some Standards/Metadata Efforts

• Dublin Core
• Visual Resources Association (VRA) Core
• Encoded Archival Description (EAD)
• Computerized Interchange of Museum Information
  (CIMI)
• Records Export for Art and Cultural Heritage
  (REACH)

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Dublin Core (3/95)

• improve resource discovery
• anticipate precision problems of Web
  Crawler-based searching tools
• existing metadata could be dumbed down
• elements should be simple to understand and use,
  so that any individual should be able to assign
  terms him/herself
• software might eventually automatically generate
  very base-level metadata

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Dublin Core

• Title
• Creator
• Subject
• Description
• Publisher
• Contributors
• Date
• Type

• Format
• Identifier
• Source
• Language
• Relation
• Coverage
• Rights

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Dublin Core

• every element is both optional and repeatable
• elements are cross-disciplinary
• elements are extensible by organized communities
• can employ a syntax such as htmls
  ltMETAgt tagset

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DC Qualifiers

• allows one community to express important nuances
  and qualifications, while still making the basic
  importance available to communities with simple
  needs
• our community can reflect alternate title,
  transliterated title, and main title, yet they
  will all be found under a simple Web search under
  title

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Discovery MetadataRecent History

• Dublin Core (3/95)
• Warwick Framework (4/96)
• Image Metadata Workshop (9/96)
• Canberra, Helsinki, ... DC (98)
• Digital Library Collaboratory (97-)
• DC-8, Frankfurt 10/99

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Dublin Core--further work

• Warwick Framework
• metadata packages for extensible functions
• layed groundwork for RDF
• Canberra Qualifiers
• refining the semantics of the element set to
  provide more precise info
• SUBELEMENT, SCHEME, LANG
• Granularity
• no hierarchical relationships w/i a given DC
  record only one record per discrete object
  (collection or item-level), and relationship
  field plus qualifier links them

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The Research Process and Functional Categories
of Metadata

• Discovery
• Retrieval
• Collation
• Analysis
• Re-presentation

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Making of America II-

• Background of the DLF Project
• Administrative Metadata
• Structural Metadata

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Other Types of Metadata-

• Longevity
• Identification/Provenance
• Rights Management

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The Short Life of Digital Info Digital Longevity
Problems-

• Disappearing Information
• The Viewing Problem
• The Scrambling Problem
• The Inter-relation Problem
• The Custodial Problem
• The Translation Problem

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Identification/Provenance (Images)-

• The number of variant forms of a work can be
  enormous
• Image Families
• A digital image frequently has many layers of
  parentage
• Information about the parentage that can indicate
  the quality and veracity of the image (Dublin
  Core "Source" and "Relation")
• how to deal with different versions derived from
  the same scan or different encoding schemes
• Vocabulary Standards to express this

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NISO/DLF Image Metadata WorkshopPossible Goals

• Metadata fields
• Rules for Field Contents (authority control)
• Core set of necessary fields
• Syntax for expressing fields and contents
  (headers)

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Other Metadata

• Description of depiction/surrogate (What VRA
  calls its "Surrogate Categories")
• Description of original object
• Rights and Reproduction Information
• Location Information

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Data StructuresThe VRA Core

• 28 elements specifically for visual resource
  collections
• Work Description Categories-
• Visual Document Description Categories-
• http//www.oberlin.edu/art/vra/dsc.html

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Data Value Metadata(vocabularies)

• LCSH
• TGM
• AAT
• ULAN
• TGN
• VRA Core

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Metadata for Digital Commerce

• DOI
• ltindecsgt-

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Metadata Mapping-

• Crosswalks
• Resource Description Framework (RDF)

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Metadata Philosphies

• Minimalists vs. Structuralists
• From Pidgeon to Creole (add structure and tenses)

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Collaborative Metadata Projects-

• OCLC CORC Project
• Computerized Interchange of Museum Information
  (CIMI)

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Visual Materials Metadata, Standards, and Best
Practices for Digital Libraries

• Howard Besser
• UCLA School of Education Information
• Baca, Murtha (ed). Introduction to Metadata, Los
  Angeles Getty Information Institute, 1998
• http//www.gseis.ucla.edu/howard/image-meta.html
• http//www.gseis.ucla.edu/howard
• http//sunsite.Berkeley.EDU/Imaging/Databases/sta
  ndards
• http//sunsite.Berkeley.EDU/moa2/
• http//sunsite.Berkeley.EDU/Longevity/
• http//www.gii.getty.edu/timeandbits/
• http//www.nlc-bnc.ca/ifla/II/metadata.htm
• http//purl.oclc.org/metadata/dublin_core/
• http//purl.oclc.org/corc//
• http//lcweb.loc.gov/ead/
• http//www.cimi.org/