Meta means self-referential or something that refers to itself. One time I had a Meta-Thanksgiving where all the food looked like a turkey, even the pie. That was so meta. But in the library and museum world, being meta is a big deal because all information needs to be accessible. The only way to do that is to describe the information with metadata, i.e. data about data.
The most confusing thing about metadata is the number of different ways to record and store it. For example, there are multiple types of metadata:
Descriptive metadata describes the data or information source.
Structural metadata indicates the organization of the item, such as chapters.
Preservation metadata contains information needed to keep the item accessible long-term, such as the file type and program version used to access it.
Provenance metadata records where the item came from, who owned it, and any changes that are made by the holding organization.
Use metadata logs the use of the item by library and museum users, which has expanded in ease since the advent of the internet and digital objects.
Administrative metadata covers the information needed to administer the item, such as copyright information and user permission for an item.
Then there are metadata schemas, which are meant to keep the entries standardized to increase ease of accessibility and use. In the library and museum world alone there is Dublin Core, EAD, MARC, METS, MODS, PBCore, PREMIS, TEI, and VRA Core. Many other professions have their own version of metadata for research data and other work. For example, geographic information often uses Geospatial Metadata (ISO 19115). Each one of these schemas provides guidelines for what information needs to be recorded about an item and how it should be recorded to encourage consistency.
The Last McCoy Library currently uses basic Dublin Core, as it is the schema supported by Omeka. Below is a screenshot of the first 5 items' metadata.
Image 1 - Dublin Core metadata for the first five items in the Last McCoy Library. The columns read: Title, Subject, Description, Creator, Source, Publisher, Date, Contributor, Rights, Relation, Format, Language, Type, Identifier, Coverage: Temporal, and Coverage: Spatial.
The following is a quick list of what goes in each column and the standards I use for each, which will be discussed in the next several blog posts.
Title - A plain text title assigned by me based on what the item's content and existing titles so as not to duplicate.
Subject - Subjects based on that contents of the item. These subjects are searched for through the Library of Congress Thesaurus for Graphic Materials to provide consistency. I aim for three subjects.
Description - A plain text description of the item. For photographs, it includes the content as well as any markings or writing on the versa, or back, of the photograph.
Creator - The name of the person who created the item, although this is often unknown for older items.
Source - The physical source of the digital file, i.e a description of the type of item (such as cabinet card), the color profile (black and white or color), and the size of the item in inches.
Publisher - The name of the publisher, useful for books and other published works. Personal letters and photographs are not considered published. If the cabinet card has a company name on it, I put it here as they technically published the photograph.
Date - The date the item was created. This can be established as an exact date when available or as a range of dates when I have to estimate based on content and context. It should be in the format of YYYY-MM-DD, but for the most part I only have years included.
Contributor - Persons or companies that contributed to the creation of the item. Currently, I put the names of the people in the photographs or the name of the person letters were written to or about.
Rights - The copyright status of the items. Here I use rightsstatements.org, which provides standardized statements of rights for most situations. The only exception is I use "Public Domain" instead of "No Copyright" as items created before 1924 have fallen out of copyright and into the public domain. I will talk more about this in future posts.
Relation - How the item is related to the Last McCoy Library, such as to what collection it belongs.
Format - The format of the item based on guidance by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority Media Types.
Language - If there is writing on the item, I include a language code as standardized by the Library of Congress Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages.
Type - The type of item based on the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Type Vocabulary that is listed under Section 7. Mostly this will be "image" or "text".
Identifier - The unique identifier assigned to the digital object as discussed in my post A File By Any Other Name.
Coverage: Temporal - The time period during which the item was created. I developed my own local standardized vocabulary that I will discuss in a future post.
Coverage: Spatial - The place where the item was created or the place the item concerns as dictated by the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names.
All of these standards help keep the Last McCoy Library organized and easily accessible for any one interested in knowing more about McCoy family history. It's a lot, but being meta means knowing yourself and how to present yourself.
In the next few posts, I'll talk more about subject headings, standard vocabularies, and other elements of metadata.
コメント