Choosing a Digital Repository

In addition to the Digital Imaging project talked about over the last few blogs, I will also be responsible for the presentation of a digital repository in my LS 566 Metadata class. Now there are a ton of really great digital repositories out there across the web, covering a wide variety of subject matter, and differing greatly in the manner in which images are presented and described, so the task of choosing just one can be a little bit overwhelming. Also a consideration is the requirements for our presentation, which include identifying information such as: the metadata schema and content standards utilized, any digitization standards noted, and features like whether the metadata records are included in any online catalogs or aggregators. This means that any "ideal" choice for this assignment will probably include quite a bit of detailed, "under-the-hood" type information on the site itself, or at least be prominent enough that those characteristics would be mentioned by any outside sources discussing the site. So how to go about choosing?

With the aid of a few links from our professor, I was off in search of a good digital image repository. As someone who has an avid interest in history, I was hoping to find something with a distinctly historical bent, maybe with pictures from the Civil War, or a similar era. After a few keyword searches, though, I came up with a collection that sounded fairly intriguing, housing a variety of governmental posters from World War II. The World War II Poster Collection from the Government and Geographic Information and Data Services Department at the Northwestern University Library (isn't that a mouthful?) is a digital collection of over 300 posters issued by various governmental agencies during the period of the second World War that were intended to help maintain the morale and resolve of the American people during that great conflict. I always find it interesting to see the values and priorities that were emphasized in documents from the past, so the process of browsing through this repository has been an interesting experience so far. Also interesting, from a library and information studies perspective, is the integration of the collection's records with the cataloging systems of both Northwestern University, as well as OCLC. Taking a closer look at the mechanics underlying these records, and the makeup of the repository, will be a big part of my assignment going forward, and I will be sure to post my progress in this direction.

If you've never taken a look at World War II posters before, they are definitely an interesting part of Americana, so take a few minutes to browse if you get a chance.

On Subject Description: "Ofness and Aboutness"

One of the major challenges that catalogers and metadata creators confront in subject description is in identifying the intended meaning behind the object being examined. While many books, images, and recordings are relatively straight-forward in the themes and topics they explore, there are also many instances in which the intended meaning of the object is distinctly different that its superficial characteristics. George Orwell's Animal Farm, for instance, is superficially the tale of animal interaction on a fictional farm, though the meaning behind this story is a satire and critique of the Russian Revolution and the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union. In the cataloging and metadata world, these distinctions represent the difference between the "ofness" of a work, and the "aboutness" of a work. Being able to identify both is a key component in ensuring that a bibliographic item is correctly described.

For a slightly different look at this topic, check out this recent post from one of my LS 566 classmates, which examines "ofness" and "aboutness" in the context of a Pablo Picasso painting, as well as some links providing a bit more insight into the subject.

Looking at my assigned Dublin Core elements

Date, Creator, Contributor...these will be the Dublin Core elements that my two groupmates and I will be responsible for as part of our LS 566-Metadata digital imaging assignment. It's a pretty interesting grouping, being fairly straight-forward in the type of information being inputted-there's not a huge amount of room for interpretation as opposed to something like the Subject field. Nevertheless, these are some fields where consistency in data entry will be supremely important, as the lack of uniform dating, or author names, for instance, can really wreak havoc for users of the collection. As part of our first task for the assignment, my group was asked to look at the three elements and to discern whether they would be appropriate, or necessary, for the needs of the collection being described. I've included my brief thoughts below.

Date (Art Images)-This is the element I am personally responsible for, and one that I discussed in a little more depth during an earlier blog post. Date would seem to be an essential metadata element for nearly any collection, and is likely to have multiple uses in the description of digital art images, including: item creation date and the date of digitization, as well as the copyright date. The foremost considerations for using the Date element will be the use of a consistent format for date entries, and the question of how the dates can be best associated with the information they represent. The use of qualifiers or refinements, where possible, should significantly help with the latter.

Creator (Football Images)-The Creator element represents the individual or corporate entity responsible for the creation of the item being described, such as the: author, photographer, or artist. This would also seem to be an obvious element to be utilized in the description of digital images, so long as the specific photographer(s) are known. As with Date, the issue of controlling entry terms to ensure consistency will be one of the important considerations when working with the element. Determining a standard order by which Creator names will be inputted would go a long way toward easing our work with this element.

Contributor (Football Images)-My group struggled with trying to determine the relevance of this element to our project. Commonly used for persons or entities such as illustrators, translators, or anyone responsible for adding to the content being described, Contributor may not be needed when dealing with this collection of digital photographs. It is possible that a person responsible for graphically editing the content of the photos, or perhaps their digitization, could be listed under this element, if their identity is known.

So there is a brief rundown if what I will be working on for the digital imaging project. It should be an interesting experience, and I'm especially looking forward to looking at using some elements that will be requiring a bit of authority control in their entry. Looking forward to hearing about how the rest of the class feels about their assigned elements.

Dublin Core: Format

Having officially submitted my ranked list of Dublin Core elements to our professor for assignment, I was more than a little surprised about some of the less obvious ones that managed to squirm their way up toward the top of my list. Date, as I discussed last blog, ended up being my first choice, but the equally unexpected Format element did not follow too far behind. Now when you normally hear the word "format" in the Digital Age, the idea of specific types of computer files is probably something that comes to mind - Word documents, Powerpoint presentations, mp3s, mpegs, and jpegs all being notable examples we encounter daily. It's a safe bet that a Format element is likely to include this type of technical information, but as I discovered, it also goes beyond that in its task of helping to describe the nature of an informational resource.

The Dublin Core Format element aids metadata creators in providing a location for the specific physical and digital qualities an information resource to be described. For digital items, this includes details such as: file formats, programming languages, file sizes, digital dimensions (i.e. resolution), and encoding standards. When describing physical materials, Format would similarly describe information such as: physical dimensions, duration, and the specific medium carrying the resource (i.e. audio cassette, 35mm photograph). Like many of the Dublin Core elements, Format also has several refinements, or qualifiers, that can enable a greater specificity in the level of description, including: IMT (Internet Media Type), Extent, and Medium.

While this type of description may seem to be more on the mundane side than something like the Subject tag, it nevertheless still plays a vital role in the information that it conveys to users. Knowledge of specific file formats or encoding standards, for example, can alert users to the need for certain types of software in order to access the desired information resource. Description of the physical extent or medium for an item can similarly help a user decide whether a specific information object adequately fits criteria they are looking for. Format is thus a fairly integral aspect of describing both digital and physical materials, and an intriguing possibility to work with.

Dublin Core: Date

As I'm going about trying to order the DC elements I would like to work with, it is interesting to see some of the complexity, and problems, with elements that would appear to be fairly straight-forward and simple. Take the Date element for instance...not a real difficult item to wrap your head around, right? Just put the copyright date or something? Well, no, it's not quite THAT simple. Dublin Core actually allows several qualifiers to be used in conjunction with Date, such as: Created, Valid, Available, Issued, and Modified, in order to modify the type of temporal information that can be entered in a metadata record. Thus, you can use DateIssued for something like the publication year for a work, or DateCreated for when an electronic document was first generated if needing more specificity than the general Date element can provide.

Another consideration for the entry of date information includes the exact format or sequence with which it is entered into a record. For example, today's date can be described:

February 23, 2014

February 23, '14

Feb 23, 2014

23 February, 2014

2/23/14

2/23/2014

23/2/14

23/2/2014

2-23-14

2.23.14

And that just scratches the surface of variations possible, not to mention factoring in foreign languages. So which format does a metadata creator use to ensure that the date is adequately understood by potential users? Accounting for regional differences in date presentation, and the fact that computers can't even interpret some of the variations, there is no perfect solution. The W3CDTF encoding scheme is one possible solution, and prescribes the use of the YYYY-MM-DD format for single dates. Whichever method is settled upon by the metadata creator, however, the importance of consistency in date entry can not be overstated. 

What Dublin Core element would YOU like to work with?

Our digital imaging project has been assigned, and we've got Dublin Core elements spinning around in our head. But what to choose, what to choose?

Like many of my LS 566 classmates, I'm currently trying to figure out how to make some sense out of ranking the 15 Dublin Core elements in order of preference to work with for our big semester project. A whole Dublin Core element all to myself, should be easy right? Pick the easy one you dolt! Well, some of them are theoretically simpler than others, but they all have their wrinkles and quirks, and I don't foresee any one path carrying significantly less work than any other...not that that is a great way of going about choosing to begin with.

So, what do we have to work with here...I know I left a list of Dublin Core elements lying around here somewhere.

Voila!:

-Title

-Creator

-Subject

-Description

-Publisher

-Contributor

-Date

-Type

-Format

-Identifier

-Source

-Language

-Relation

-Coverage

-Rights

If I'm going to be spending a lot of time on this project, and I have no reason to suspect I won't, then I might as well get my money's worth and pick something I'm actually interested in working with. Subject is an obvious choice, right off the bat, as I have enjoyed subject description in the past, and am always fascinated with trying to figure out what an item is about. Perhaps I can bring some elements of controlled vocabulary to it as well?

Title is pretty straightforward, but when dealing with items that don't necessarily have an already-defined title, it posits the chance of complications.

Creator...oooo, there's another one where some possibility of vocabulary control exists.

Lot of tough choices ahead, but I'm sure there will be some extremely valuable experience going along with any element I ultimately get assigned. What would you pick?

On the importance of subject description

In my last blog, I touched a little bit on some of the basic differences between keyword and subject searches. For the library field, the notions of controlled vocabulary and subject headings have been under scrutiny and debate for some time, owing to the proliferation of natural language searching and the still-present difficulty in helping users understand how to properly use a catalog subject search. Two articles I recently encountered for my cataloging class break down some of the reasons why subject headings retain an important place in the library catalog, and suggest what part they might still play in the growing digital information world.

The first article, by Arlene Taylor and Tina Gross, entitled, “What Have We Got to Lose? The Effect of Controlled Vocabulary on Keyword Searching Results,” points to the important role that subject headings and subject searches play in facilitating retrieval of relevant resources for catalog users. Subject headings not only provide a controlled method for searching, but also function indirectly through showing up via keyword searches. According to the study done by Taylor and Gross, if the subject entry were to be eliminated from the catalog, or withdrawn from keyword searches, approximately one-third of related resources would fail to provide hits. This is a significant number of items that would elude the user’s search. Additionally, since the terms in question are located in the subject field, they are more likely to provide quality resources as relate to the user’s search of terms found in, say, the summary field, or table of contents (which are sometimes entered into a record). This isn’t to completely discard keyword searching, however. Users appear to have difficulty understanding how to search for controlled-vocabulary subjects, at times, or may not know exactly which terms to utilize for a given search. As keyword searches are easier, in some ways, to understand, they are sometimes preferred by users. So it is not so much a matter of choosing keyword searches or controlled vocabulary searches, rather it is ensuring that we infuse the precision of the latter into the usability of the former.

In “On the Subject of Subjects,” Arlene Taylor further advocates for the importance of utilizing subject headings and controlled vocabularies, as well as extending their use into the electronic domain and the Internet. Taylor points out that despite the pre-eminence of keyword searches for use by Internet users, keywords continue to be a poor option where precision of search results are desired. Not only does controlled vocabulary counteract this through the notion of specific entry, but it also serves to increase the possible search parameters for a user through the relating of broader and narrower terms for a subject, as well as synonyms, near synonyms, and other valid variations. Controlled, subject-based description does is not without its faults, however. Taylor expresses that there is certainly a place for keyword-based techniques, owing to their simplicity, lower cost to create, ease of maintenance (automated), and ability to stay current. What is advocated for the digital environment is a system in which less important, ephemeral resources can be indexed automatically using keyword-technologies, while those intended for long-term use can fall under controlled vocabulary systems. 

It is interesting to note that since the latter article’s publication almost 20 years ago, subject-based vocabulary control does not seem to have taken a strong foothold in the online environment, and likely for very obvious reasons - cost, speed, currency, and the ability to automate. While resources such as WorldCat and the Digital Public Library of America, among others, show the possibilities that online, linked resources can accomplish with controlled vocabularies, the world of digital information in general exhibits a pretty low degree of accurate description, much to the chagrin of searchers and their millions upon millions of hits. Is there a better way? Surely now that Pandora's box has been ripped open, it will be all but impossible to stuff it back in.

-Gross, T, and AG Taylor. n.d. "What have we got to lose? The effect of controlled vocabulary on keyword searching results." College & Research Libraries 66, no. 3: 212-230. Social Sciences Citation Index, EBSCOhost (accessed February 18, 2014).

-Taylor, Arlene G., 1941-. 1995. "On the subject of subjects." Journal Of Academic Librarianship 21, 484-491. Education Full Text (H.W. Wilson), EBSCOhost (accessed February 18, 2014).