Towards a Shared Cataloguing Tool for VR Collections

Planning for the DLF's Academic Image Cooperative (AIC) demonstrated that a shared, web-accessible cataloging database comprising rich descriptions of art historical works promises to be of enormous value to educational and cultural communities. Like comparable bibliographic utilities (OCLC, RLIN), it would serve both scholars and catalogers. For scholars and students it would act as invaluable reference tool. For custodians of visual resource collections in libraries and other institutions, the database would inform and facilitate local cataloguing activities; begin to minimize the redundant effort that image cataloging activities presently involve, by providing an authoritative, critical mass of cataloging records available for local repurposing; and ultimately foster appropriate local implementation of standard controlled vocabularies. The database, finally, could have a number of potential business applications, for example, to those active in the private market for art historical objects.

Although a prominent feature on the want lists of appropriate professional communities, the construction of such a database has so far proved too complicated to try.[1]

Yet recent developments afford an unparalleled opportunity to successfully assemble the database described above.

The AIC accordingly proposes a prototyping initiative that will:

Assemble a prototype database of between 300,000 and 500,000 descriptive records sourced from between 3 and 6 institutions. Records will be supplied in their native formats and mapped by the AIC to a specified implementation of the VRA Core. Once assembled, the database will be evaluated by a small group comprising scholars and visual resource professionals. The DLF and the AIC will also evaluate technical, organizational, and business implications involved in transitioning the prototype into operational service.

Although more detailed functional specifications for the prototype will be developed at an initial stakeholders' meeting, the following service description is offered as a starting point for discussion and derives. It derives from a meeting of the AIC held in New Haven on 3-4 August 2000.

The prototype will at a minimum:

The project is expected to take place over the course of 2001 and to run in tandem with a test distribution of the Academic Image Cooperative service. It will begin by identifying stakeholding participants including data suppliers, data users, and applications developers, and representative domain specialists. Stakeholders will be convened in a meeting to develop a detailed functional specification for the prototype and its evaluation as well as and key milestones for the project's progress. Thereafter, the prototype will be built according to specification and subjected to formal evaluation and review by project participants.

Notes

1. The REACH and VISION projects played a significant role in the promulgation of metadata standards for art objects and provided valuable data about the complexities and challenges of creating and sharing image- and object-based information across communities and systems. The REACH project attempted to extract information of interest to researchers from commonly-used museum management systems, and to assemble that information into a single database with a Web interface. Overtaken by other developments, including the tandem evolution of the VISION project, the project was terminated. REACH differed from the current prototype in at least one fundamental respect insofar as it attempted to integrate information about objects in a heterogeneous group of museums. The collection scope of the current prototype is more rigorously defined by fine art and architecture, and further circumscribed by virtue of the prototype's focus on image collections created in support of overlapping and in many cases common academic curricula. The VISION project was similarly constrained to art historical images from academic visual resources collections and other research collection but also less ambitious than the current prototype. Fundamentally it set out to evaluate application of the VRA Core Categories. The project is documented in VRA Bulletin 25:4(winter 1998). VISION and REACH are compared in Elisa Lanzi's contribution to Art Documentation 17:1(1998).

2. See http://www.oclc.org/corc/, http://content.engr.washington.edu/, and http://www.luna-imaging.com/insight.html.