Collection Description:
Why, and Whither?
Ronald Milne
Weimar 23 November 2005
Collection Description
• The concept is not new
• Archivists have been compiling collection
descriptions of archival collections for many
years (fonds level description)
• Item descriptions might be preferred in the
library world, but collection descriptions also
have considerable value
• What is a collection?
What is a collection?
The term “collection” can be applied to:
• Any aggregation of physical or digital items
May include manuscripts, archival material,
printed books, CDs, digital surrogates of physical
items, collections of ‘born digital’ material …
Research Support Libraries Programme
(RSLP)
•
A £30M funding programme for UK university libraries with research
collections; financed by the four UK Higher Education Funding Councils
(1998 – 2002)
•
Promoted collaborative work among research libraries, mainly within higher
education but also with the national libraries and other libraries with
research collections
•
Attempted to promote a holistic view of library and archive activity
throughout the UK
•
Funded circa 50 collaborative projects mainly dealing with traditional library
materials, but in almost every case creating an electronic resource.
•
Outputs included: bibliographic and archival records, collection descriptions,
digitised images and texts, web directories and portals
Collection description – why?
• Guides to special collections already available in print form: eg
Bloomfield's Directory of rare books and special collections in the
United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland
Collection description – why?
• Why not put such a guide on the web?
• Seemed a simple idea, but complexities soon crept in
• RSLP focus groups agreed that collection level
descriptions for print collections would be a good idea
• Increase in inter-disciplinary academic work
• Faculty focused on one particular subject may not be so
well acquainted with other subject areas
Collection description – why?
• General public also interested in collections
• Apart from discovering the collections and
checking on their content one could, for
example:
– Check in advance to avoid unfruitful visits to
libraries/archives
– Check to learn about restrictions on materials
Development of RSLP Collection
Description work
• Important to describe collections in a consistent and machinereadable way
• Talked to archivists – made clear that we were not seeking to push out
ISAD(G)/EAD
• Archival profession very supportive
• UK Office for Library Networking (UKOLN) had already undertaken
work using RSLP and OCLC funding: Michael Heaney’s Analytical
model of collections and their catalogues, available through:
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/rslp/model/
• RSLP collection description schema developed: a structured set of
metadata attributes, for describing collections in the RSLP projects
(based on Heaney’s analytical model)
• UKOLN developed a tool that projects could use
• Collection Description Focus set up at UKOLN (June 2001 - )
RSLP Collection description model (simplified view)
See: www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/rslp/schema
See also: Powell, Heaney and Dempsey: RSLP Collection Description D-Lib Magazine September 2000.
<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september00/powell/09powell.html>
Collection description gathers pace
• A number of RSLP-funded projects used the schema and the tool
and the RSLP schema became the emerging or ‘de facto’ standard
• Adopted by the UK New Opportunities Fund for collection
description within the projects it funded
• RSLP fields mapped onto ISAD (G)
• Schema now normally used with any SQL-compliant relational
database, using a webform for data entry
• (Typically) output is XML
Collection Description Projects
• Various approaches:
– Discipline based
• [eg: Mapping Asia (Humanities and Social Sciences
collections relating to Asia, the Middle East and North Africa),
Backstage (Performing Arts), Cecilia (Music), EGIL (Icelandic
Studies), Revelation (Theology), Genesis (Women’s Studies)
– Regional
• [eg: RASCAL (Northern Ireland), Mapio Cymru (Wales)]
– National
• [eg Cornucopia (UK)]
– International
• MICHAEL (Italy, France, UK)
Collection description: some issues
• Issues relating to metadata standards – considerable progress made
towards standardisation (NISO draft standard)
• Taxonomies/subject indexing – clear that this is necessary within a
particular collection description project, but how do you conduct a
metasearch when different thesauri are used in different projects? Use
a common thesaurus (eg UNESCO Thesaurus)?
• Decision on common name authority would also be helpful
• In cross domain projects there are sometimes different emphases –
museums concerned with format type, libraries with named collections
– an issue?
• How does one measure collection strength and collection quality?
(Conspectus? iCAS software)
• How do you know what collection descriptions are available?
• Collection description not necessarily embedded as core work task for
print collections, therefore how does one FUND this activity?
Collection description: whither?
• RSLP schema forms the basis of the Dublin Core Collection
Description Application Profile (DC CD AP)
• NISO Metasearch Initiative has published draft standards for trial
use - largely DC CD AP, with minor differences
• Accessing Collection Descriptions possible via structured network
services protocols:
– Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI PMH)
– Search Retrieve Web (SRW) for distributed searching
• UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Information
Environment Service Registry Project (IESR) and National Science
Foundation (NSF)-funded OCKHAM project
Ronald Milne
Acting Director of University Library Services
& Bodley’s Librarian
ronald.milne@ouls.ox.ac.uk
+44 (0) 1865 287107