LIB 122: Week 5 (February 11, 2014)

In class this week, we continued our discussion of Dublin Core metadata elements. We spent a significant amount of time looking at how different institutions manage the “rights” field in their metadata records. Some require users to contact the department to determine terms of access and others use blanket statements about fair use, public domain, and relevant copyright laws. My favorite came from East Carolina University who had a rights statement related to orphan works which essentially asked end users to let them know if a particular image fell under copyright and should be taken down. I liked it because it did not assume that the cataloger was an authority on the content of the digital object, and encouraged the general public to participate in the identification of the origins of the image. Linda went on to help us differentiate between the “type” and “format” elements in Dublin Core. I find that the distinctions are easier to discern if the cataloger has a good grasp on what the record is describing, the analog item or the digital object. For instance, a metadata record for a physical photograph (analog) would have a dc: type value of “image” and a dc: format value of “8x10”; and a metadata record for a scanned photograph (digital) would have a dc: type value of “image”, and a dc: format value of “image/jpeg”. It also helps if I can remember that the DCMI is the controlled vocabulary that populates “type”, while the MIME controlled vocabulary corresponds to “format”. Today’s class also featured discussions on medium, extent, coverage, description, and subject elements. My experience with archives have enabled me to get familiar with Library of Congress subject headings but there are so many more to learn about; I’m looking forward to utilizing the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), Thesaurus for Graphic Materials (TGM), Union List of Artists Names, and Thesaurus for Geographic Names (TGN). Our midterm assignment requires us to select a metadata strategy and identify metadata elements; determine if they will be required, searchable, or hidden, if they should utilize a controlled vocabulary, and what our data entry protocols will be.