Richard J. Urban

The Colorado digitization program: a collaboration success story

The Colorado Digitization Program has received several IMLS Leadership Grants. The Heritage Colorado and Western Trails grant projects both involved extensive collaboration between libraries, museums, historical societies and archives. Successful collaborative activities included creating best practices, metadata and scanning standards, training, metadata input tools, technological interoperability, and funding strategies.

Collection/item metadata relationships

Contemporary retrieval systems, which search across collections, usually ignore collection-level metadata. Alternative approaches, exploiting collection-level information, will require an understanding of the various kinds of relationships that can obtain between collection-level and item-level metadata. This paper outlines the problem and describes a project that is developing a logic-based framework for classifying collection/item metadata relationships. This framework will support (i) metadata specification developers defining metadata elements, (ii) metadata creators describing objects, and (iii) system designers implementing systems that take advantage of collection-level metadata. We present three examples of collection/item metadata relationship categories, attribute/value-propagation, value-propagations, and value-constraint and show that even in these simple cases a precise formulation requires modal notions in addition to first-order logic. These formulations are related to recent work in information retrieval and ontology evaluation.

Rule categories for collection/item metadata relationships

Collections of artifacts, images, texts, and other cultural objects are not arbitrary aggregations, but are designed to support specific research and scholarly activities. Collection-level metadata directly supports this objective, providing critical contextual information. However, exploiting this information, especially in a semantic web environment of linked data, requires a precise formalization of the rules that characterize collection/item metadata relationships. Toward this end we are developing a logic-based framework of relationship rule categories for collection/item metadata. This framework will support metadata specification developers, metadata catalogers, and system designers. In earlier work we described three example rule categories for propagation of information from collections to items. Further reflection, and examination of metadata in an RDF testbed, has revealed eighteen categories, which form an interrelated system with three levels of specificity and formal constraints differentiating categories. This paper summarizes the results of a three year effort, part of the IMLS Digital Collections and Content project.

Library Influence on Museum Information Work

Contemporary literature on the divergence of libraries, archives, and museums over the course of the twentieth century credits the rise of distinct professional practices required to handle different physical forms. This paper explores the extent that librarianship influenced museum information practices in a predigital era. Instead of divergence, I find examples where museums adapted library methods to fit their needs instead of developing their own set of professional practices. Because museum professionalization placed an emphasis on discipline-based university training, information work in museums has been incorporated into nonuniversity technical education and on-the-job training programs. That this divergence of information work from academic preparation has fallen along gender lines requires additional attention.

The return of the trivial: problems formalizing collection/item metadata relationships

Formalizing collection/item metadata relationships encounters the problem of trivial satisfaction. We offer a solution related to current work in IR and ontology evaluation.

3D Technologies: New tools for information scientists to engage, educate and empower communities

This panel provides an overview of the adoption of three-dimensional (3D) technologies by librarians and information scientists as tools for community engagement. 3D technologies –scanning, printing, and design– are some of the latest technical innovations making inroads into the library and museum environments. After a brief introduction on the technical aspects of 3D technologies, specialists from academic and public libraries discuss their experience implementing 3D services, with a special focus on newly established partnerships. In addition, they comment on the impact of the technologies on their institutions and communities. Empowering users to scan or create 3D objects often results in a growing collection of 3D digital files. An information scientist discusses how to manage these collections to ensure preservation and fair intellectual property practices. Finally, a museum professional describes creative ways of using 3D objects to enhance the museum experience and to expand the interaction of the public with museum artifacts. Following the presentations, the panelists engage in public discussion of the challenges and opportunities of these transformative technologies.

Representation patterns for cultural heritage resources

The universe of available cultural heritage metadata schemas grows more complex every day. Existing schemas are optimized for use in the library, archive, or museum domains and to fit the needs of shared services and applications. Emerging Linked Data approaches introduce additional challenges for metadata designers and creators responsible for implementing these standards. In other domains, design patterns are used to clearly articulate problems, their contexts, and available solutions. This poster introduces preliminary research to identify such patterns in cultural heritage metadata standards using content analysis and a participatory design methodology.

Technical architecture overview: tools for acquisition, packaging and ingest of web objects into multiple repositories

This poster describes a model for acquiring, packaging and ingesting Web objects for archiving in multiple repositories. This ongoing work is part of the ECHO DEPository Project, a 3-year NDIIPP-partner digital preservation project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with partners OCLC, a consortium of content provider partners, and the Library of Congress

Towards a logical form for descriptive metadata

Open linked data and semantic technologies promise support for information integration and inferencing. But taking advantage of this support often requires that the information carried by ordinary colloquial metadata records be made explicit and computationally available. Given the structured nature of most metadata records this looks easy to do; and conversion from metadata records to computer processable knowledge representation languages such as RDF is now commonplace. Nevertheless a precise formal characterization of the semantics of common colloquial metadata records is more involved than appearances would suggest. We explore two approaches to formalization and discuss some issues related to the nature of identifier elements in colloquial metadata records and the use of individual constants in knowledge representation.

Principle violations revisiting the Dublin Core 1:1 Principle

Although many best practice documents encourage Dublin Core metadata creators to obey the 1:1 Principle, this recommendation has proven extremely confusing in practice. The impact of this confusion is widespread violations of the Principle that inhibit the ability of large-scale metadata aggregations to provide useful services. A preliminary operational definition of the 1:1 Principle that identifies of non-conformant descriptions is explored.