On Fri, 22 Jan 1999, Karen Coyle wrote:
> But take this case: There's a famous photograph by Ansel Adams. I (with
> permission, of course) scan it and have it in my digital archive. For
> discovery purposes, my metadata should describe the photograph, the
> Creator is Ansel Adams. In fact, the item I am cataloging is a digital
> image, the creator is myself. So I have two creators of two items, one
> being the content, the other being the form. And one of them is nearly
> useless for discovery. So, if for some reason you had to catalog the
> catalog record, would there be a DC place for the creator of the book?
> Because without that information, your metadata record isn't much good.
> And although you can decide not to create metadata for catalog records, we
> are going to create a lot of metadata for "transformed" content.
It all comes down, again, to perceived uses and values. One person's
'nearly useless for discovery' is another person's 'great, thanks!'. What,
for example, if the Guggenheim decides to mount a web-based exhibition of
works by Ansell Adams. Having obtained necessary permissions (of course!),
they want to find examples of Ansell Adams' work in an on-line digestible
form (i.e - image files, not prints).
It is true that the electronic images are effectively only surrogates of
the 'original' (which is ACTUALLY a negative - the print hanging on the
Gallery wall is just a surrogate, too...), but in many cases it may be the
surrogate with which you wish to deal (because the negative is too fragile
to touch, or too big, or it's in London, or whatever).
Indeed, taking it further (and some people might want to), the photograph
may be considered a surrogate of Mount Rainier, of which it's a picture,
because it's the MOUNTAIN that people are searching for. We can assume,
can we not, that the user doesn't expect several million tonnes of rock
squirted down their phone line... ;-)
The example is a bit extreme, but the point applies. There aren't any
universally agreed 'resources', nor any universally agreed 'surrogates'.
Different things have different values to different communities at
different times, and the Dublin Core is sufficiently flexible to allow
both 'normal' use, 'pedantic' use, and variations in between, based upon
the changing window upon resources that both creators and users wish to
perceive things through.
By moving away from the flexible concept of using 'Creator' to refer to
the creators of resources, surrogates, surrogates of surrogates, etc.,
towards hard and fast definitions of 'metadata' creators and 'resource'
creators, our powerful and flexible window becomes so much less flexible,
and terribly constrained by the current view of the cataloguer, who is
forced to decide whether a 'thing' is metadata or not. When is it ever
REALLY that simple a binary decision (and if a decision APPEARS to be
simple, how often do we regret the choice we made later...?)
It's all 'stuff', so why not apply the same procedures to it, regardless
of where it happens to lie on the resource - metadata continuum...?
Surely that's one of the wonderful opportunities the 1:1 rule offers us?
Paul
-- dr. paul miller - interoperability focus - [log in to unmask] --
u. k. office for library and information networking (ukoln)
tel: +44 (0)1482 466890 fax: +44 (0)1482 465531
---------------------------- http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/ --
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