REPORT ON PORTLAND WORKSHOP: 27-28 MAY 2010

06/10/2010 Using Descriptive Metadata and Controlled Vocabularies to Enhance Access to Visual Collections

This workshop addressed standards for cataloging cultural

works and images as well as improving and enhancing

institutional techniques for creating descriptive metadata in the

digital landscape.

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Report on Portland Workshop: 27-28 May 2010 U S I N G D E S C R I P T I V E M E T A D A T A A N D C O N T R O L L E D V O C A B U L A R I E S T O E N H A N C E A C C E S S T O V I S U A L C O L L E C T I O N S

PRE-WORKSHOP EXPLORATION OF CONTENTDM COLLECTIONS AT REED COLLEGE The day prior to the workshop, Karin Whalen, the Visual Resources Librarian at Reed College, graciously gave me an introduction to the CONTENTdm collections at Reed College. In addition to asking questions about customizations which Reed College has implemented, I was also able to discuss metadata and workflow issues.

Reed College has utilized open source apps, such as Zoomify, to customize their user interface and improve the end-user experience. As Reed College is not currently part of a larger CONTENTdm group (such as the Mountain West Digital Library) it was imperative for them to create an interface that would organize information and arrange it in a user-friendly fashion that is easily accessible both on and off campus to the Reed community. There are eleven separate collections: Antiquarian Maps, Ara Pacis, Art & Architecture, Artists’ Books, Classics Image Database, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery Exhibitions, The Illuminated Poissy Processional, Indian Converts, Reed College Senior Theses, U.S. History –Dirks, Women of Reed College.

FIGURE 1: HOME PAGE TO REED DIGITAL COLLECTIONS

Four of these collections are available to the public, with some portions of a collection restricted as needed due to copyright restrictions. All of the collections are available to members of the Reed community via electronic user ids and passwords.

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Each collection is able to have its own metadata schema, whilst still providing an excellent cross-collection search interface for end-users. Figure 2 below shows the advanced search interface, which allows a user to choose specific collections to search in conjunction with specific search terms.

FIGURE 2: ADVANCED SEARCH INTERFACE AVAILABLE TO PUBLIC USERS.

The returned results display can be customized easily by the end-user’s preferences as shown in Figure 3.

FIGURE 3: RESULTS PREFERENCES INTERFACE.

In terms of the specific metadata schemas used, each schema is customized for the anticipated end-user groups in conjunction with the overarching standards for administrative metadata as decided by the Library’s Digital Librarian. Some of the decisions made by Digital Librarian regarding administrative metadata fields such as course numbers, requesting professors, and professors using a resource for class were interesting. Although maintaining a record of requestors and statistics of course usage is important, it seems a bit odd to always include this in the administrative metadata. In many situations, this information could be gleaned in

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other ways (such as through the personal collections of images created by professors for lectures and/or image reserves which are also hosted through the CONTENTdm interface). The amount of time spent updating these fields as the information changes would seem to be a less than productive use of resources.

One of the more aesthetically pleasing customizations of the CONTENTdm web interface is exemplified in the Artists’ books collection. Figure 4 is an example of the display for tobacco Project: Red Book by Xu Bing.

FIGURE 4: DISPLAY PAGE FOR XU BING TOBACCO PROJECT: RED BOOK

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The end user is shown a slide show of the multiple images that comprise the compound object. Below the slide show, the user is presented metadata about the object as well as additional information such as a hyperlink to the Library OPAC record, a hyperlink to the compound object in CONTENTdm (Figure 5), a Biography of the artist, a list of other books by the artist in Special Collecitons, and References and links.

REFLECTIONS ABOUT PRE-WORKSHOP Mountain West Digital Library is a wonderful site that provides wonderful resources to our community and gives SLCC a broader presence on the web and increases our visibility amongst other members of the Mountain West Digital Library as well as the users of the site outside the SLCC community. Should, at some point in the future, we choose to provide a local user interface to our collections which streamlines the user experience, is customized to our digital collections, and has the goal of bettering user services whilst continuing to tie in with the mission of the Library and the role that ELIE plays in organizing and providing access to institutional information in a user-friendly fashion, some of the modifications which Reed College’s collections

FIGURE 5: VIEW IN CONTENTDM.

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exemplify could be implemented with little cost in resources. The majority of these modifications were done using freely available open source applications which can be implemented with relative ease if the manpower were made available.

For example, in the case of the Student newspaper digitization project, the use of open source applications such as Snap shots could be of use with the inclusion of abstracts. Depending on the way the digitized deliverables and metadata is created by the University of Utah, the ability to enlarge resources using the open source application Zoomify could possibly be a useful tool to provide end-users.

Of particular interest in relation to compound objects was the solution Reed uses to display an object like Tobacco Project: Red Book. A similar web interface could have interesting implications for how SLCC could present manuscripts and large format photo albums from the Archives to our end users. Although this would be down the line, creating such a customized web interface could 1) improve user satisfaction, 2) raise visibility on the web, and 3) increase awareness of the resources available in both the Archives as well as the digital institutional repository.

The possibilities of using different collection specific metadata schemes to maintain interoperability whilst customizing metadata such that it provides better information retrieval relevant to our user groups is another point of interest. Although our current metadata schema is adequate and provides good access to our digitized collections, as special projects emerge in the future, it might be worth considering the addition of different metadata fields to improve user access.

While much of what I exposed to with the Reed Digital Collection is not currently applicable to the SLCC institutional repository, it was exciting to see what a small college has done with its digital collections as opposed to a large university like the University of Utah, The University of Texas at Austin, or Texas A&M University. And it was enlightening to discover what could be done with CONTENTdm in the way of customization and modifications with a minimum of additional resources required.

SUMMARY OF THE WORKSHOP This workshop focused on the obstacles that face institutions digitizing works and the difficulties and opportunities involved with generating descriptive, administrative, and rights metadata.

The workshop was presented by Murtha Baca, the head of Digital Art History Access at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. For many years, her work has focused on the production and dissemination of the Getty's vocabulary databases: Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT®), Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN®), and Union List of Artist Names (ULAN®). Her publications as editor include Introduction to Metadata (revised edition, 2008) and Introduction to Art Image Access (2002). She was a co-editor of Cataloging Cultural Objects: a Guide to Describing Cultural Works and Their Images (Chicago: American Library Association, 2006). Her other publications include numerous articles on thesaurus construction, multilingual equivalency work, data standards, and documentation of art, architecture, and material culture.

The primary content standard examined was CCO (Cataloging Cultural Objects) which is a descriptive standard designed specifically for the cultural heritage and visual resources communities (see Figure 6).

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FIGURE 6: CCO ENTITY RELATIONSHIP DIAGRAM.

CCO is conceptually very similar to RDA (Resource Description and Access) which is anticipated to replace AACR2r (Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules) in the near future. Some of the commonalities between CCO and RDA which we discussed are as follows:

• Both explicitly deal with issues of display vs. indexing • Both stress “relationships.” • Both stress the importance of authorities. • Both are independent of information communication format (yet associated with certain formats). • Both are compatible/combinable with other standards (example: Morgan Library & Museum). • Both are designed to build and rely upon the cataloger’s judgment. • Both are derived from English-language conventions, but adaptable world-wide in other languages.

Some of the distinct differences between CCO & RDA we discussed are listed below.

• Definitions of “work,” expression, manifestation, item (per FRBR) do not work well for unique cultural objects and built works.

• CCO provides guidelines for descriptive metadata for unique items, neither for bibliographic items nor Web resources (however, some items, e.g. some decorative arts, prints, etc. may appear as multiples).

• For CCO, items are not “self-describing.” • Titles and names are often handled differently.

The similarities between the two standards were discussed in conjunction with the FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) entity-relationship diagram (see Figure 7).

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The relationship between data standards, controlled vocabularies, and how they interoperate in digitized collections and institutional repositories was examined with hands-on cataloguing examples focused on cultural objects.

In the context of real cataloging issues, Baca addressed the basic decision-making that surrounds: data structures and data values; describing works and images; display values vs. indexing values. Also addressed was the fundamental issue of optimizing collection metadata so that users can successfully find materials via Google and other commercial search engines. Specifically topics discovered included:

• The “Visible Web” versus the “Deep Web” o The Visible Web is what you see in the results pages from general Web search engines &

subject directories (static Web pages). o The Invisible or Deep Web consists of data from dynamically searchable databases that

cannot be indexed by search engines, because they aren’t “stored” anywhere. • What Google “looks at”

o Title Tag o Text on the Web page o Referring links

• What Google doesn’t “look at” o Keywords meta tag o Description meta tag

The chart below (Figure 8) breaks down how search engines interact with different types of metadata associated with objects in a digital collection.

FIGURE 7 : FRBR AND CCO DIAGRAMS.

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• Challenges with Metadata for the World Wide Web o How to assist users in “unmediated” searching, browsing, etc. o How to present large, complicated amounts of data in a way that users can understand and

interpret. o How to create “cataloguing for the Web”: harnessing and adapting the power of metadata

and controlled vocabularies. o How to provide reliable, up-to-date, “authoritative” metadata.

• Facing the Challenges o Institutions need to carefully chose and consistently apply metadata schemas to their collection

information. o Application of vocabulary resources (including local authorities and thesauri) is essential for

enhancing end-user access. o Use of picklists, thematic groupings, and “browsing categories” based on institutions’

organized data improves end-user access. o Careful and consistent implementation of title tags and other metadata on Web pages

facilitates end-user searching and retrieval of web resources. o Use metadata and usability analysis should be a routine part of digital library work.

FIGURE 8: SEARCHENGINEWATCH.COM INFORMATION ON HOW COMMERCIAL SEARCH ENGINES WORK.

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o Don’t create hyperlinks simply because you can. o Study end-user behavior (including your own).

The workshop ended with a discussion of further methods for enhancing access to materials, specifically social tagging, tag clouds, taxonomies, folksonomies, social bookmarking, and combining user-generated metadata with “authoritative” metadata.

REFLECTIONS ABOUT WORKSHOP Although I have experience with CCO as a descriptive standard, this workshop was very useful. Firstly, this workshop was an excellent refresher on the finer points of CCO and how exactly CCO interrelates with the current cataloguing standard AACR2r, the future cataloguing standard RDA, and FRBR. Murtha Baca was extremely well-versed in all areas and treated the workshop as an open forum in which we were free to ask questions and present hypothetical situations for discussion by the group. Secondly, Murtha focused on the challenges associated with generating metadata for the World Wide Web whilst still maintaining high standards of quality and best practices. Thirdly, the discussions of how to use further methods for enhancing access to digital materials with a minimum of additional resources were intriguing.

The discussions the group had regarding data standards, controlled vocabularies, and how they interoperate in digitized collections and institutional repositories were very valuable. The group consisted of participants from a variety of institutions: art museums, visual resource collections, archives and institutional repositories, and MLS students. The differing perspectives presented by this diverse group allowed us to delve into a variety of scenarios and possible solutions to the needs of an institution, an end-user, and the constraints of resources. Of particular interest were the ways in which different institutions developed local authorities, specifically how those institutions utilizing CONTENTdm as their DAMS handled controlled vocabularies. Many of the institutions shied away from cataloguing directly into CONTENTdm and instead used a separate system with built-in authorities (such as IRIS or museum management systems) and then imported the data into CONTENTdm. Regardless of how the metadata was input into CONTENTdm (or other DAMS), the challenges to generating metadata optimized for search and retrieval on the World Wide Web was a concern for many in the group. Much time was spent discussing how commercial search engines like Google find materials, and the challenges with such metadata outlined above in the section “Summary of the Workshop” were very useful. As our collections at SLCC are currently available through the Mountain West Digital Library, in many ways we do not currently have control over how these challenges are being addressed. However, the summary of challenges and how an institution could usefully approach these metadata concerns is something that might be useful to consider whilst generating metadata for our collection. With the rapidly evolving digital landscape, it is always prudent to envision what metadata might prove vital for future initiatives, even if currently that metadata is somewhat superfluous.

The concluding discussions regarding further methods for enhancing access to materials were primarily focused upon web 2.0 technologies. The incorporation of social tagging, tag clouds, social bookmarking and combining user-generated metadata with “authoritative” metadata can be very useful in some collections. One example of a digital collection which employs a combination of both user-generated metadata and controlled vocabularies is accessCeramics. This site allows end users to browse, do specific term searches, and look at tag clouds as ways to navigate the site.

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FIGURE 9 : ACCESSCERAMICS NAVIGATION TAG CLOUD.

My only disappointment with the workshop was that we did not cover multimedia or film objects very thoroughly. Especially in light of the recently digitized VHS resources that our institutional repository archives now has, I had hoped to be able to discuss in more detail how metadata standards could be used in such cases to improve retrievability of such resources via commercial search engines. However, Murtha did discuss a few sites from which I could locate examples of how others have dealt with this issue in the visual resources and cultural objects communities. Additionally, initiatives such as the Open Video Project developed by UNC Chapel Hill should prove useful in analyzing how other groups address these issues in digital collections.

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WORKSHOP RESOURCES

Pre-Workshop Agenda: Exploration of Reed College Digital Collections in CONTENTdm with Karin Whalen (May 27, 2010)

11:00 Introductions & overview; goals for the day

11:15 Guided tour of the Reed College Digital Collections by Karin Whalen, Visual Resources Librarian

12:15 Reed’s customizations of CONTENTdm user interface to improve end-user experience

1:00 Lunch and discussion

1:30 Reed College’s metadata schemas in each CONTENTdm collection; metadata generation workflow; CONTENTdm workflow

2:00 Searching, browsing, and local authorities

2:20 Q&A, discussion, next steps

Workshop Agenda:

Using Descriptive Metadata and Controlled Vocabularies to Enhance Access to Visual Collections (May 28, 2010)

Workshop Presentations:

Grappling with Metadata

Controlled Vocabularies: An Overview

Notes on Rights Metadata

Practical Principles for Metadata Creation & Maintenance

Exploring Social Tagging

Managing a Documentation Project

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Links to Resources Controlled Vocabularies/Thesauri:

AAT

ULAN

TGN

Iconclass

Library of Congress Authorities

LC Thesaurus for Graphic Materials I: Subject Terms

LC Thesaurus for Graphic Materials II: Genre & Physical Characteristics Terms

Data Content Standards/Cataloging Guidelines:

CCO

CDWA Cataloging Examples

Web Page Tagging Guidelines

Data Structure Standards/Schemas:

VRA Core 4.0 XML Schema

Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA)

CDWA Lite XML Schema

MODS (Metadata Object Description Schema)

MARC XML

METS (Metadata Encoding Transmission Standard)

Other Resources:

Metadata Standards Crosswalk

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Readings

Baca, M., ed. Introduction to Art Image Access

Baca, M., ed. Introduction to Metadata

Baca, M. on Controlled Vocabularies from ELIS

Baca, M. on Social Tagging (article forthcoming from Museo y Territorio)

Baca, M. and S. Clarke, “FRBR for Works of Art”

Baca, M. and E. O’Keefe, “Sharing Standards and Expertise”

Bates, Marcia J. “The Cascade of Interactions in the Digital Library Interface”

Bates, Marcia J. “Indexing and Access for Digital Libraries and the Internet”

Harpring, Patricia. Introduction to Controlled Vocabularies

Shreeves, Sarah et al. “Moving towards Shareable Metadata”

Sullivan, Danny, “How Search Engines Work”

Sullivan, Danny, “Search Engine Features for Web Masters”

Tennant, Roy, “Bitter Harvest: Problems & Suggested Solutions for OAI-PMH Data & Service Providers”

Whalen, Maureen, “Rights Metadata Made Simple,” from Introduction to Metadata