D26 - Metadata Watch Report #5

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Metadata Watch Report #5

APPENDIX A: Domain report: cultural heritage sector

Correspondent: Michael Day, UKOLN

Current state of domain

Many current developments in this domain are based on implementations of the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and the tools being developed by the Open Archives Initiative. Despite some problems with terminology (see the paper by Hirtle), the use OAI appears to offer the cultural heritage domains (and others) a relatively 'light-weight' way to develop interoperable services based on simple metadata encoded in XML. Other topics that will be covered in this report will be an update on recordkeeping metadata, some developments originating in the museum world (including an XML DTD for the SPECTRUM standard) and the establishment in the UK of a Collection Description Focus.

Peter Hirtle, OAI and OAIS: what's in a name? D-Lib Magazine, 7(4), April 2001. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april01/04editorial.html

Recordkeeping developments

In the general archives and recordkeeping domain, an international group of recordkeeping experts have formed an Archiving Metadata Forum in order to exchange information, to explore issues in more depth and to identify areas of potential collaboration. The group was set-up at a meeting held in the Netherlands in June 2000, and consists of recordkeeping, resource discovery and information technology experts from Australia, North America and Europe.

Archiving Metadata Forum: http://www.archiefschool.nl/amf/

In Australia, recordkeeping metadata initiatives have begun to build upon the Australian Recordkeeping Metadata Schema (RKMS), a general framework developed by the SPIRT Recordkeeping Metadata Project of the School of Information Management and Systems at

Monash University in Melbourne. The RKMS defines a highly structured set of metadata elements that conforms to a data model based on that developed for the Resource Description Framework (RDF). The schema is designed to be extensible and can inherit metadata elements from other schemas. In June 2001, the State Records Authority of New South Wales (NSW) published the NSW Recordkeeping Metadata Standard (NRKMS). The standard was issued under the NSW State Records Act 1998, and is a mandatory standard across all NSW public offices. The Victorian Electronic Records Strategy (VERS) has also defined a metadata scheme for 'self-documenting' records, published in April 2000. This scheme has been designed to be compatible with the Recordkeeping Metadata Standard developed by the National Archives of Australia, despite being based on a different conceptual model.

Australian Recordkeeping Metadata Schema: http://rcrg.dstc.edu.au/research/spirt/

NSW Recordkeeping Metadata Standard: http://www.records.nsw.gov.au/publicsector/erk/metadata/rkmetadata.htm

Victorian Electronic Records Strategy: http://www.prov.vic.gov.au/vers/

OAI-related initiatives

Another line of work centres on the technical framework being developed by the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). Version 1.1 of the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting was published on 2 July 2001. The US Digital Library Federation (DLF) is now encouraging the use of the OAI. The DLF, in co-operation with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, are supporting the development of testbed gateways that will use OAI harvesting techniques to allow users to access distributed digital library holdings as if they were part of a single collection. A wide range of domains and organisation types has an interest in the use of the OAI protocol. In August 2001, the list of registered OAI data providers included e-print archives, subject gateways, libraries, text archives and many other kinds of organisation. One example of its proposed use is by the UK Resource Discovery Network (RDN) who have developed an experimental OAI protocol-based system for record sharing between RDN subject gateways.

Herbert Van de Sompel & Carl Lagoze, The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, v. 1.1, Open Archives Initiative, 2 July 2001. http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.htm

Digital Library Federation evaluation of the Open Archives Initiative: http://www.diglib.org/architectures/testbed.htm

Andy Powell, An OAI approach to sharing subject gateway content. Poster presented at WWW10: the Tenth International World Wide Web Conference, Hong Kong, 1-5 May 2001. http://www10.org/cdrom/posters/1097.pdf

The museum domain is also investigating the use the OAI technical framework. The CIMI Consortium, for example, participated as a pre-release tester of the OAI protocol. The consortium is aware that much museum data is "hidden" away from Web search engines

in databases, exhibition catalogues, research papers, etc. Perkins suggests that the OAI technical framework might help provide an enabling technology to facilitate the federating of distributed information services and their discovery and use. CIMI has developed an OAI-based Metadata Harvesting project to investigate the potential of OAI for museums and to provide a testbed implementation.

CIMI Metadata Harvesting Project: http://www.cimi.org/wg/metadata/

John Perkins, A new way of making cultural information resources visible on the Web: museums and the Open Archives Initiative. Paper presented at Museums and the Web 2001, Seattle, WA., 14-17 March 2001. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2001/papers/perkins/perkins.html

Within the library domain, a team based at the Virginia Tech Digital Library Research Laboratory (DLRL) has recently undertaken to create an XML Schema to help support the wider distribution of MARC records in OAI contexts. The Virginia Tech team has defined an XML transport format for MARC so that MARC (presumably MARC21 or USMARC) records can be exchanged using the OAI protocol. This is not the first project to investigate the conversion of MARC structured records into XML or SGML-based formats, but

it is the only one with a specific focus on the OAI. Related (but older) MARC-XML projects include the XMLMARC DTD developed by the MEDLANE project at Stanford University Medical Centre and the SGML and XML DTDs created by the Library of Congress MARC DTD project.

Virginia Tech MARCXML initiative: http://www.dlib.vt.edu/projects/OAi/marcxml/marcxml.html

Stanford University MEDLANE project: http://xmlmarc.stanford.edu/

Library of Congress MARC DTD project: http://lcweb.loc.gov/marc/marcsgml.html

Museum developments

The CIMI Consortium are involved in the development by mda (formerly the Museum Documentation Association) of an XML Document Type Description (DTD) for SPECTRUM, an international standard for the description of museum objects. CIMI are setting up a SPECTRUM XML-DTD Testbed project that aims to demonstrate the DTD's potential for data migration and exchange, for the integration of systems and the reuse of content.

CIMI SPECTRUM XML-DTD Testbed: http://www.cimi.org/wg/xml_spectrum/

SPECTRUM: http://www.mda.org.uk/spectrum.htm

Bart Degenhart Drenth, Building on the mda SPECTRUM-XML DTD for collections management data interchange. Paper presented at Museums and the Web 2001, Seattle, WA., 14-17 March 2001. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2001/papers/degenhart/degenhart.html

Another museum-based development that may have relevance for metadata is a new European Museums' Information Institute (EMII) project that will be funded as part of the European Commission's Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme. At the present time (August 2001), there is little information available about this project, which is called the EMII distributed content framework (EMII-dcf). A preliminary description on the mda Web pages says that EMII-dcf will establish a working model for the provision of various types of content (text, images, film, video, etc.) from various sources (museums, broadcasters, archives, libraries, etc.) within EC funded research projects.

EEII-dcf: http://www.mda.org.uk/200106c.htm

Collection description developments

Another recent initiative is the UK's Collection Description Focus. This is a 12-month project that will build on work on collection-level description previously undertaken as part of the Research Libraries Support Programme (RSLP) and the Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). Johnston and Robinson (2001) say that the Focus "will look into the development of simple tools to facilitate the creation and management of collection descriptions". These will include "tools to support transformations between different collection description schemas; enhancements to data creation interfaces; the use of a schema registry to publish and share CD schemas; and mechanisms for 'harvesting' distributed descriptions".

The Collection Description Focus is jointly funded by the JISC Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER), the RSLP and the British Library.

Collection Description Focus: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/

Pete Johnston & Bridget Robinson, Collection Description Focus. D-Lib Magazine, 7(7/8), July 2001. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july01/07inbrief.html#ROBINSON

Maintained by: UK Office for Library and Information Networking (UKOLN)
Last updated: 01 October 2001