Hi Karen,
I am taking liberty to copy (down below) a message calling for public review of CWDA Lite that was posted yesterday to CNI-ANNOUNCE and subsequently forwarded to other lists.
FWIW I find the online description of CWDA (Categories for the Description of Works of Art) as published by the J. Paul Getty Trust to be generally helpful in thinking about the multifarious problems of metalanguage (terms of art) and multiple standards which have been recently under debate here. I would especially point out the section on Classification:
http://getty.edu/research/conducting_research/standards/cdwa/2classification.html
To crib from the Getty site, briefly CWDA Lite is an XML schema whose purpose is "to describe a format for core records for works of art and material culture, based on the data elements and guidelines contained in the CDWA and CCO ... CDWA Lite records are intended for contribution to union catalogs and other repositories using the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) harvesting protocol. Elements 1 through 19 in this schema are for descriptive metadata, based on CDWA and CCO. Elements 20 through 22 deal with administrative metadata. All attributes are optional unless otherwise noted."
My view is that work on standards-based metadata schemas (as currently underway within a number of different communities) represents the cutting edge of what this discussion seems to have been searching for, e.g. a new set of codes and practice for creating access that will span the gap between existing content data standards and future online implementations whether original or re-mixed. My intention in passing this on is to expand the horizon of ongoing discussion.
BTW the reference below to upcoming discussion of CWDA Lite at MCN in November is pointing to the annual conference of Museum Computer Network, info at:
http://www.mcn.edu/
Grace Wiersma
Cataloging & Metadata Services
MIT Libraries
gwiersma_at_mit.edu
(617) 253-0643
-----Original Message-----
From: CNI-ANNOUNCE -- News from the Coalition [mailto:CNI-ANNOUNCE_at_cni.org]
On Behalf Of Joan K. Lippincott
Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2007 3:10 PM
To: CNI-ANNOUNCE -- News from the Coalition
Subject: [CNI-ANNOUNCE] CDWA-Lite Call for Public Review
CDWA-Lite is a lightweight XML schema that describes core information
for cultural materials and their visual surrogates. It is described
below.
The Advisory Committee for this standard is seeking broad community
review of it from a technical viewpoint as well as for its value in
collection cataloging and access/sharing. We encourage completion of
the survey (or those parts of it you are comfortable with) at
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=625603692421
While the survey will provide the most useful basis for review,
additional comments outside the survey are welcome at
cdwalite_at_getty.edu.
Please respond before 31 May 2007. We anticipate a discussion of the
results of this review in conjunction with the MCN meeting in Chicago, 7
- 10 November 2007.
CDWA-Lite Advisory Committee:
Günter Waibel, OCLC/RLG
Nick Poole, MDA
Erin Coburn, Getty Museum
Nancy Allen, ARTstor
Jenn Riley, Indiana University
Michael Jenkins, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Kenneth Hamma, Getty Trust
CDWA-Lite:
getty.edu/research/conducting_research/standards/cdwa/cdwalite.html
Summary:
Over the last two years ARTstor, the J. Paul Getty Trust, and RLG
Programs/OCLC have worked together to develop an XML schema to describe
cultural materials and their surrogates to provide an easier and more
sustainable model for contributing to union resources. This initiative
was driven by the absence of a data content standard specifically
designed for unique cultural works, and a technical format for
expressing this data in a machine-readable format.
The result of this effort is CDWA Lite, an XML schema based on the core
elements from Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA), a
framework for documenting and organizing information on cultural works
and images. CDWA Lite is intentionally *lightweight,* to encourage
and facilitate its use even by small institutions in cataloging, online
publishing, and exposing metadata.
The schema recommends using Cataloging Cultural Objects (CCO), a data
content standard for unique cultural works that provides guidelines for
selecting, ordering, and formatting data used to populate elements. It
is designed to promote good descriptive cataloging, shared
documentation, and enhanced end-user access. CDWA Lite was specifically
designed for use with the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
(OAI/PMH), which is a standard for delivering, sharing, and
disseminating metadata records expressed in XML syntax.
CDWA Lite is made up of 22 descriptive and administrative elements, of
which only 9 are required; it is not meant to be a comprehensive element
set for describing or cataloging works in a collection. Instead, a CDWA
Lite record contains the minimal amount of relevant and critical
information needed for facilitating ease of access to unique cultural
works in the online environment. CDWA Lite reflects the core
descriptive documentation traditionally captured about works in
collections, which makes adoption of this model for contributing records
to union resources all the more attainable.
CDWA Lite intends to meet the following objectives:
- To provide a simple, low-barrier model for capturing the
essential amount of information about unique cultural works in order to
facilitate a high return on accessibility and resource discovery. The
minimal set of information needed to facilitate ease of access to
collections.
- To reduce the overhead and labor involved in contributing to
aggregated resources and digital repositories. Format and export data
one time only in a standards-based way for contribution to a variety of
*venues* in the online environment.
- To ensure a method for being able to provide updated, accurate
information about works of art that are accessible in the online
environment. Data integrity and accuracy occurs at the source of the
collection.
- To provide a mechanism for bringing users back to a resource in
its native environment. Learn more about a work in the context of its
larger collection.
The Advisory Committee will organize a public meeting to discuss
responses to the CDWA Lite survey and other feedback received from the
community during the MCN conference in November 2007, which will take
place in Chicago.
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Karen Coyle
Sent: Friday, May 11, 2007 6:54 AM
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Yes but
Well said, Jonathan. If you look at any of the "crosswalks" that have been done between RDA and MARC, you can see that they are only including the fields from 100-899. Essentially it has been decided that everything in the 00x and 0xx range is not part of the cataloging rules - so what are they part of_. And there are many fields in the range 100-899 that have no equivalent in RDA and perhaps should NOT have one. I really do feel that we've got multiple competing standards - well, maybe "competing" isn't the right way to say it. We definitely have multiple standards that are applied to create our catalog records, and I'm not at all sure that they work as well together as they should. We have AACR2, we have ISBD, we have ISO 2709 (MARC record format), we have MARC21. Note that we also have multiple standards creation points - JSC, LoC, NISO. This, too, seems to be problematic to me because there isn't a clear division of responsibilities between them.
kc
-----Original Message-----
>From: Jonathan Rochkind <rochkind_at_JHU.EDU>
>Sent: May 10, 2007 4:35 PM
>To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
>Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Yes but
>
>The first step to getting out of MARC is removing any _guidance_ from
>MARC, and removing any _data model_ from MARC. MARC ought to be an
>encoding format. If MARC really _was_ just an encoding format, than it
>would be easy to use other encoding formats too.
>
>But in fact, significant portions of our mostly implicit data model
>(and subsequent 'element vocabulary', in what I believe is the language
>of DCAM) are really in MARC. Significant portions of our value
>vocabularies (what is the mini-controlled vocabularly for this field)
>are in MARC, significant portions of our content guidance (how do you
>choose this value) is not in fact in AACR2, but in MARC. We need to put
>all that stuff where it goes. Once we've done that, then MARC is just
>another encoding format, and we can much more easily switch to a
>different encoding format, and use multiple encoding formats
>simultaneously.
>
>If the DCMI/RDA thing goes like many of us hope it will, it will be a
>significant step in that direction, just by helping us to be clear about
>what RDA is, what our element vocabularies and guidance are. But it will
>still leave a lot undone too, in large part becuase of the things that
>RDA doesn't even cover, that are just left to MARC when they ought not
>to be!
>
>Jonathan
>
>K.G. Schneider wrote:
>>> The MARC issue seems a lot more relevant than the issue of 'proprietary
>>> and outdated' software? Our ILS uses an Oracle db to store the
>>> information, and can provide an xml interface to the data - surely it's
>>> the data formats that are the issue here. Although the data is 'held' in
>>> the system - to a large extent the system does a lot of work to extract
>>> the relevant information from the MARC records (which we've insisted on)
>>>
>>> Owen
>>>
>>> Owen Stephens
>>> E-Strategy Co-ordinator
>>>
>>
>> Yes, I almost didn't add a comment about our software, though that comes
>> into play. It interested me that the RDA-DC agreement that Karen Coyle
>> wrote about went unmentioned because de-MARCing MARC seems to be pivotal
>> to serious change.
>>
>> K.G. Schneider
>> kgs_at_bluehighways.com
>>
>>
>
>--
>Jonathan Rochkind
>Sr. Programmer/Analyst
>The Sheridan Libraries
>Johns Hopkins University
>410.516.8886
>rochkind (at) jhu.edu
Karen Coyle - on the Road
kcoyle_at_kcoyle.net
skype: kcoylenet
Received on Fri May 11 2007 - 09:42:05 EDT