[Metadatalibrarians] The one-to-one challenge

[Diane I. Hillmann]

Folks:

A couple of people contacted me off-list about the citation I 
mentioned.  I figured it would be useful to just throw it out on the 
list, along with an example of a project I really like that used a 
creative approach to cope with materials in a variety of formats and 
their relationships.

First, the citation: Liz Bishoff and Elizabeth S. Meagher. "Building 
Heritage Colorado: the Colorado Digitization Experience" In, /Metadata 
in Practice/, edited by Diane Hillmann and Elaine Westbrooks.  Chicago : 
ALA Editions, 2004.  The chapter includes detail on the difficulties the 
project had in trying to deal with digital versions of physical 
materials of various kinds.  The points made about the problems of 
pulling apart a composite record which includes descriptions of both 
items is well worth noting.

As an alternative to the "mush them together" approach, I suggest a look 
at the KMODDL project (http://kmoddl.library.cornell.edu/  --click on 
"About KMODDL" then look for "Metadata Activities").  This project dealt 
with a much broader variety of digital surrogates and also described 
resources that referred to the digital models that were of interest.  
There's a good paper about this project written for DC-2005 which can be 
found here: http://dcpapers.dublincore.org/ojs/pubs/article/view/811

Abstract:

"The Kinematic Models for Design Digital Library (KMODDL) exemplifies 
digital collections in which groups of objects are versions of the same 
resource and which resources are related to one another taxonomically. 
Other objects in the collection are supplementary materials that 
explicitly cite the primary KMODDL resources. To manage the complex 
relationships among KMODDL objects while maintaining the DC one-to-one 
principle, metadata developers established controlled vocabulary 
encoding schemes that linked related objects. The solution implemented 
enables users to find all versions of a resource and all supplementary 
materials that cite the resource in a single search."

Diane