[SCC_Active_Members] FW: First Monday May 2006; also referring to today's e-mail exchange between Paula J. and Jonathan C.

[hgladney]

FYI. 

Two articles in the latest issue of First Monday seem to me pertinent to
pending CHM decisions about digital repository infrastructure, Web page
management, and creating virtual museum services that will include materials
being worked on by SCC volunteers.  See below.
		========================

At least two tensions are pertinent within the next year:

(1) Conformance to standards that facilitate information sharing vs. freedom
of action in each cultural history institution that wants its content to be
widely seen and accessible.

(2) A portion of the above focused on metadata.  For roughly a decade, the
research library community has agreed that a flexible metadata standard that
is widely used is extremely important.  However, even this relatively narrow
community has been unable to agree what that standard should be.  A
descriptive quip is, "There are enough standards available that you can
surely choose one that almost covers what you want to do!"  Part of the
problem is that there are few broadly applicable objective criteria for
selecting among competing metadata proposals.

The Dublin Core (DC) Standard was agreed on over a decade ago as a least
common denominator that might be used as a stop-gap until something more
expressive could be agreed on.  There is widespread consensus that Dublin
Core is inadequate for any "serious" collection.  Nevertheless, today for
the majority of library objects that are described by some standard
metadata, the description is little more than DC, sometimes with ad hoc
institutional extensions that do not pretend to participate in any standard.

The Research Libraries Group (RLG) (see http://www.rlg.org/) is lining up
behind (perhaps little more than lip service) METS--the Metadata Encoding
and Transmission Standard, which is managed by the Library of Congress.
METS conforms to the OAIS archival framework; many authors and library
managers emphasize that their repositories conform to OAIS (see
http://nost.gsfc.nasa.gov/isoas/); however it is problematical whether
either of these assertions convey much, because OAIS is primarily a
reference model that identifies what it means to be an archive and defines
jargon intended to facilitate conversation.  I.e., almost any digital
repository software conforms to OAIS, even packages that were created a
decade before OAIS was written!  (Note: I have discussed this topic with Don
Sawyer, the principal author of OAIS.  He substantially agrees with the
opinion just expressed, which is not a criticism of OAIS, but rather with
some people's attempts to use it beyond what it is capable of.)

A prominent criticism of METS is that it permits too much flexibility,
particular flexibility vis-a-vis institutional extensions, so that there is
some question whether or not conformance to METS in fact provides enough
standardization so that sharing document descriptions among libraries is
easily and truly effective.  However, among the library-community-originated
metadata standards, I believe it is the front runner for eventual adoption
among the membership of RLG.  It also figures strongly in consideration by
governmental archives.
 
I suspect that the situation among museum institutions is similar, but am
not personally familiar with the opinions and writings of this community.  

Business community (including health care industry) interests in these
topics are conspicuous by their absence.

I suspect that many of the 75+ kinds of metadata fields of interest to the
CHM Collections staff are for curatorial information that would be private
to CHM, or at least not shared with CHM visitors even if it might be shared
with a few sister institutions.  Incorporating and supporting such private
metadata within a Greenstone-based repository should be very easy.  (BTW,
one of the attractive things about Greenstone is that it has good "front
end" tools for curators to create and manage metadata, as well as for
accessioning and rearranging collections ported from other environments.)

Cheerio, Hnery

-----Original Message-----
From: Readership of First Monday [mailto:FIRSTMONDAY at LISTSERV.UIC.EDU] On
Behalf Of Edward J. Valauskas
Sent: Thursday, May 04, 2006 9:26 AM    To: FIRSTMONDAY at LISTSERV.UIC.EDU   S

The May 2006 issue of First Monday (volume 11, number 5) is now available at
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_5/

-------

Table of Contents: Volume 11, Number 5 - May 1st 2006

... 

What's the matter with the information technology workforce?
by Manimegalai M Subramaniam and Kathleen Burnett
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_5/subramaniam/

... 

A review of national information and
communication technologies (ICT) and a proposed National Electronic
Initiative Framework (NEIF) by Alan R. Peslak
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_5/peslak/

...  
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