metadata, taxonomies, and curation

read:

Wendy Duff, Evaluating Metadata on a Metalevel. Archival Science, Volume 1, Number 3 / September, 2001.

Lars Marius Garshol, Metadata? Thesauri! Taxonomies? Topic maps! Making Sense of it All. Journal of Information Science, 30(4) 2004.

Yan Han, A RDF-based Digital Library System, Library Hi Tech, 2006.

Lynne C. Howarth, Creating a Metadata-Enabled Framework for Resource Discovery in Knowledge Bases, University of Toronto eprint.

Adrian Cunningham, Digital Curation/Digital Archiving: A View from the National Archives of Australia, American Archivist, Volume 71, Number 2 / Fall/Winter 2008.

Sonia Yaco, It's Complicated: Barriers to EAD Implementation, American Archivist, Volume 71, Number 2 / Fall/Winter 2008.

Cornell Institute for Digital Collections, EAD/XML Finding Aids Project

I spent some time these past 2 weeks learning about the relationships between archival practice and other disciplines, and how finding aids and taxonomies reflect archival practice. Wendy Duff's article is a kind of reflection on philosophical underpinnings of archival practice and how variations in practice are reflected in the metadata chosen for 2 different schemes. Of course this is not directly relevant to finding aids. But ideally finding aids should represent the taxonomy of the collection, and allow the user to use metadata to home in on a particular object.

Duff identified the differences in the 2 schemas she looked at as an emphasis on providing metadata as evidence versus more traditional archival (as opposed to records management) concerns like custody and paper-based archival description. The evidence-based study (Pittsburgh) derived metadata automatically--a big contention of Dr Galloway's-- but it is easy to imagine how this would not necessarily be the kind of metadata useful for discovery. In fact this is much more of a purely digital item-level description--why would you even bother describing the finds? I wonder, is there a reason to try, if you can search the collection via metadata?

In information architecture we talk about representing taxonomies through navigation--would you not do something similar here? The archivist could still order the records, but since they are described more like a digital library, that is individually identifiable, alternative archival arrangements (i.e., for use) could be derived. Once again, when findability and access are NOT the only or even the primary concern of the organizational scheme, archives do not offer any easy solutions.

Garshol talks about was the relationship between taxonomies and metadata: metadata describes the digital object, and is connected to the taxonomy. The most relevant idea in his article, which is mostly about topic maps, is that even most non-archival metadata is about item administration, not describing content. The Dublin Core title field, for example, gives you an indication of the subject, but only indirectly. For more specific description he recommends thesauri, ontologies, and faceted description: these tools extend the metadata, and/or the relevant taxonomy, and allow concepts around the object to be placed in relation to one another to better encompass it.

The article on curation--by an archivist--takes issue with the two terms being used synonymously. He argues that the crucial difference is that the concept of curation does not permit the maintenance of the context necessary for digital records, nor does it address the "recordness" of the records, as evidence. To manage archival records requires " finely engineered metadata schemes" which represent the information contained AROUND the object: that of the event of creation. Like the finding aid, it is the job of archival metadata to represent the information which cannot be contained in the thing itself. He additionally criticizes both the curation model and the OAIS model for failing to account for problems with the records that date to before they cross the archival threshold. He says that this is therefore curation, of the records as objects, not archives, which begins while the record is still in use: hopefully generated automatically, as in the Pittsburgh model

Sonia Yaco's study about barriers to EAD implementation is my last follow-up from last week's reading. She found that the middleware necessary to make the marked-up finding aid accessible is itself a big problem. A study done by the hilariously named Michael J. Fox in 1999 found that 56% of institutions who do EAD then don't put it online. It seems at this point that there are enough instruction manuals and toolkits out there describing how to mark up finding aids: the question is what, then , to do with them after that. The XML is not the problem, at this stage: it's everything after that!

I am thinking that for my paper, the last part of my project, I will work on this kind of issue. I will go back to LBJ's finding aids, knowing what I know now, and see if I can make any suggestions about where they should invest their resources. It is perhaps overly simple in the sense that they don't have any born-digital records, but I am also interested in the digitization possibilities of such a collection as well. In addition, what kinds of digital asset management systems could be brought to bear here? For even LBJ at this point has lots of digital representations of records. What are the standards, how should they be managed, how should they be stored?