Draft report on a meeting to explore possibilities for developing a shared VR cataloguing service hosted by NYU with support from the DLF on 22 January 2001

D Greenstein
February 2001

Present: Lee Chamberlin (NYU), Murtha Baca (Getty), John Weise (Michigan), Linda Barnhart (UCSD), Greg Zick (Washington), Sherman Clarke (NYU), Michael Ester (Luna Imaging), Heike Kordish (NYPL), Jane Murray (NYPL), Susan Williams (Yale), Chris Sundt (Oregon), Elisa Lanzi (Smith), Ann Whiteside (Harvard), Daniel Greenstein (DLF)

This report summarizes consensus that emerged at the meeting about the design, use, and benefits of a visual resources cataloguing service, and the next steps that should be taken in the development of that service.

For the benefit of participants, the report concludes with comments that distinguish this initiative from others in which the DLF is involved, notably the Academic Image Cooperative and the Open Archive Initiative metadata harvesting testbed.

1. Aim of VR cataloguing service

(Note, the term "service" is currently under discussion and may well be replaced by "workstation" or "tool").

The service will support and promote the shared development of high-quality, consistent, reliable, and professionally developed descriptions of visual resources.

2. Service development and functions

3. Levels of use

The service will permit different levels of use including the following

4. Audience(s) and benefits

The catalogue service will have a number of direct benefits for VR cataloguers and slide and art librarians. For members of this community it will:

The service may also have a number of indirect benefits for other communities as follows:

5. Scenarios and incentives

Description contributors. Institutions with online VR catalogues will be more likely to contribute records to the service if the service supplies them with tools capable of enhancing records in those catalogues.

Contributions from trusted "level 3" users (those specialists able to add or approve authority controls) may be sought in a variety of ways:

Service developers. Previous efforts in this area have been limited by their heavy reliance on voluntary effort. Accordingly, any initiative that may be undertaken to fulfill the goals set out in this document should seek appropriate support and develop from the outset with organizational and financial sustainability as a pre-eminent goal.

6. Technological issues

The service will need to investigate use of different approaches for updating and searching respectively, possibly putting updating on an incremental as opposed to a dynamic basis

Design of an effective user interface will be challenging given that the service will need somehow to present users (cataloguers) with multiple descriptions, authorities and vocabulary choice, etc

Architecturally, the service should be developed in a manner that will cost effectively support the evolution and extension of its functions

7. Next steps

Steps to be completed by end March 2001

Preferably steps listed under 2 should completed by end April 2001

8. Relationship of VR cataloguing service initiative and other potentially complementary DLF initiatives

  1. Open Archives Initiative (OAI)

    The OAI is an international initiative that has developed a metadata harvesting protocol. The DLF supports the OAI but is not the OAI. Information about the OAI is available from www.openarchives.org

    Using the OAI metadata harvesting protocol it may be possible to assemble VR descriptions stored and managed in a single place. In this respect, metadata harvesting might provide one means for a cataloguing service to assemble raw VR descriptions.

    The metadata harvesting protocol is relatively untried; its application is highly experimental.

    In the meantime, the real effort for the VR cataloguing service is not assembling VR descriptions but developing the tools for editing, enhancing, and disseminating descriptions.

    Accordingly, although the OAI harvesting protocol might contribute a single, relatively small component to a VR cataloguing service, its experimental nature suggests that any prototype work be conducted on the basis of physical assembly of descriptions.

    This should not preclude work on experimental or prototype harvesting services that focus on visual resources. Indeed the DLF is actively hoping to encourage the development of such services.

  2. Academic Image Cooperative (AIC)

    With funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the support of the College Art Association, the AIC was initiated in January 1999 as a planning process to develop a scaleable database of curriculum-based digital images for survey courses in the history of art. The planning process was completed formally in August 2000 and resulted in a prototype database and image collection. It also developed technical, organizational, and policy frameworks that have the potential for sustaining a more ambitious online service; one capable of identifying, developing, and disseminating a far large number of curriculum-based and scholarly image collections.

    Since the completion of this planning process, ongoing discussions between the DLF and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, have focused on how the AIC's image collection - and the learning derived in its development - might contribute to a broader initiative under consideration by the Foundation and provisionally named ArtSTOR. Briefly, ArtSTOR is looking to do with visual resource materials something analagous to what JSTOR did for periodical literature in the humanities and social sciences: create an essential digital library that responds to widespread scholarly needs.

    The result is a collaboration whereby the DLF is helping the foundation to develop circumscribed, strategically identified image collections that respond to widespread teaching and other specialist scholarly needs. It is envisaged that these collections, including the one developed by the AIC, will be incorporated into the evolving ArtSTOR service, which eventually will be managed as a project of the Foundation or an organization that they designate.

    For a programmatic and preliminary description of the ArtSTOR initiative, please consult the 1999 President's Report available from the Mellon Foundation website at http://www.mellon.org/President annual report 99.pdf. These pages document the AIC's development as a DLF initiative.

  3. VRA implementation guidelines

    The DLF wishes to support the VRA in its development of implementation guidelines. Obviously such guidelines would make an important contribution to any VR cataloguing service. Work on the service is viable in advance of any such guidelines being produced.