Collection Description Why and Whither Ronald Milne Weimar

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 £ 30 M 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 machine-readable 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/september 00/powell/09 powell. 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? i. CAS 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