Tonight, Adam, Amy, Nikki and I met in our breakout room to discuss our element sets. I am charged with the source element and find myself questioning the importance if it, in this particular project. The Guidelines for Descriptive Metadata for the UCLA Digital Library Program defines source as:
A related resource from which the described resource is derived, in whole or in part. This element may also include information about the ownership of custodial history of the object.
I can totally see the need for the source element when developing guidelines for an institution such as a special collections library or a repository that holds multiple collections, especially when you would need to break it down to the collection, date, box, folder and item number level. If you are digitizing items from books, say UA's The Corolla, then of course you would need the source element to identify which Corolla the image came from.
I guess my question is this: Is the Paul Bryant Museum the type of institution that holds multiple collections in the way that a special collections library does? Or, is it its own stand alone collection where the source of the image will always be the Paul Bryant Museum?
Another question I would need to ask in order to argue the importance of my source element (and would need to be directed towards the client) would be this: Are all of this images we are working with digitized from a group of individual photographs or are some pulled from other sources, say football programs or scrapbooks?
A related resource from which the described resource is derived, in whole or in part. This element may also include information about the ownership of custodial history of the object.
I can totally see the need for the source element when developing guidelines for an institution such as a special collections library or a repository that holds multiple collections, especially when you would need to break it down to the collection, date, box, folder and item number level. If you are digitizing items from books, say UA's The Corolla, then of course you would need the source element to identify which Corolla the image came from.
I guess my question is this: Is the Paul Bryant Museum the type of institution that holds multiple collections in the way that a special collections library does? Or, is it its own stand alone collection where the source of the image will always be the Paul Bryant Museum?
Another question I would need to ask in order to argue the importance of my source element (and would need to be directed towards the client) would be this: Are all of this images we are working with digitized from a group of individual photographs or are some pulled from other sources, say football programs or scrapbooks?
You can't assume that all of the photographs were originally film photos. The source does, at the least, let you know if the item was born digital and, if possible, who took it. However, for this project, I wonder how you would get access to that information!
ReplyDeleteSource is complicated--I don't envy you! I address the importance of Source (or what I interpret it to mean, after a couple of tries) to help validate and clarify Rights over on my blog: http://wossametau.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-rights-element-connected-to-source.html
ReplyDeleteThe black and white images were digitized and the color ones are "born digital" ... if that helps :)
ReplyDeleteI keep thinking of "source" and "publisher" are the same thing. Or is it like a square can be a rectangle but a rectangle can't be a square?
ReplyDelete