David:
You wrote:
> Discovery will often seek items co-located in an
> event. The specific descriptors are critical to its documentation.
>
This seems to express a user requirement. The questions then, are how
and in what ways is this requirement satisfied and what would be the
role of "event records."
I might begin by asking how this requirement is satisfied today.
Through exhibition catalogs? Auction catalogs? Inventory lists?
Such resources (exhibition cataloges, etc.) collocate the items in
question and associate them individually and as a collection with a
particular event. Such resources also document the event: that it
occured, when it occured, where it occured, and other aspects of the
event.
In the absence of such a collocating and documenting resource (which may
not exist for any given exhibition), are you seeking another way of
"seeking items co-located in an event"?
If we create an event record, does it serve as documentation or evidence
that an event (will occur, is occuring, did occur)? That is all well
and good.
How then does such an event record help achieve the goal of discovering
items co-located in an event? If the metadata for an exhibited item
points to an event record for a particualr exhibiton, say, through the
Relation element, and if the event name or other event identifier in the
Relation element is indexed and searchable, and if all exhibited items
for a particular event had such metadata and were in a common searchable
database, then a query of "event name," for example, when limited to the
Relation index, should return the set of all items exhibited and the
desired collocation iwould be achieved.
The requirement is satisfied.
Does the event record contain pointers to all exhibited items, making
the linking bidirectional?
While I do not have the expertise to comment, from a curator's point of
view, whether such a scenario is desireable, I can see, at least, that
it is logical and implementable in a retrieval system.
Is the the sort of thing you have in mind?
I have much more difficulty with other types of events, however.
Let's say that a particular item was removed from the exhibition for a
day and then returned. These are events. For the sake of discussion,
let's pretend that the removal of the item is a significant event (it
may actually be) and that it is desireable to docuement such an event.
Would there a "removed-from-this-particular-exhibition" event record,
which is linked to the exhibition event record and the item in question?
Such linking would build a "web of knowledge" with respect to the events
and objects in question. Is this what we want metadata to do? It may
be.
Do you have this in mind?
Thanks,
--Erik
Erik Jul
[log in to unmask]
|