Yesterday, I blogged about beginning our digital image indexing, and made some predictions as to which metadata elements might be a bit of a breeze, and which ones might throw me for a loop. While I've already gone through and finished up the indexing for a good portion of the elements, a few of the more time-intensive ones have been cast aside for the time being (subject, description, title), and one I just really don't know what to do with...the Relation element.
Relation is usually used to indicate associations of an item with other items. This theoretically could be for a variety of reasons: part of the same collection, part of a specifically constructed series, created by the same person, having the same context. The problem is trying to figure out exactly what type of relation should be applied to my images (if any), and to a certain extent, where do I draw the line in determining what is "related" to them.
In my football images, for example, I have 5 that were taken during the 1975 Alabama/Mississippi (Ole Miss) game. Now do these images relate to all images taken from that 1975 Alabama/Mississippi game? One could possibly make an argument that they do, although the enormity of including all such images is daunting. Do they relate to the immediate grouping of 5 that were my assigned images? Not necessarily, as their only common thread in that regard is that I am their indexer (which I will humbly recognize as not significant).
How about my John DePol images? According to a reference sheet we have, many of them belong to broad groupings and categories, such as "Books" or "blk_arch." Should I mention all the other images from such groupings under Relation? Again, the scope of images involved makes this a potentially frightening proposition to consider repeating several times.
So when SHOULD we use Relation and what exactly should we use it for? Hopefully some kind souls, including Relation guideline people, can swing by and shed some light for us.
Use the relation element when a researcher looking at the one resource should and would want to find the larger related collection as well. For football the purpose of our collection is to relate the images sequentially. I.E. If an image is one of a multiple that we're taken of a specific play, etc. does this help?
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DeleteOk, Anissa, so we're definitely looking at smaller groupings of images then? This seems like it will take a bit of subjective analysis to determine whether an image is of the same play as another image, or not. I'm guessing that the numerical designations on the file names will assist with this to a pretty good extent. That is definitely helpful for the football images, thanks.
DeleteIn the DePol repository you use Relation to indicate a relationship to another etching that is perhaps part of the same series or is related in some other way to your image. You don't need to relate to every architecture image, but there there are a couple of image groups that belong together (ie, they depict the same scene or the same story). I hope this helps.
DeleteThe Is Part Of element is mandatory. It is technically a subset of the relation element (though you can't tell it just looking at Omeka because they aren't grouped together) You use it on every image to indicate its relation to the repository.