Week 12: Semantic Grouping of ICO Field Names

After the last meeting with the Metadata Working Group, each member was asked to either write up or put into a spreadsheet their ideas for grouping duplicate fields and to send it to me so that I could write up a summary.  Semantically, there are several fields that are similar or identical, and in order to work on determining a core set, some of these fields may need to be grouped together.  Alternatively, some of them may need to be less emphasized in favor of a more universal field name.

One of my tasks this week was to write up a summary comparing two members' suggestions for dealing with duplicate or similar fields.  I identified the following:

Brad suggested only using  Accession Number and to do away with Acquisition Date, Donor Name, Donor Notes, Location Code (archives notes this in their Accession record), Physical Location (archives notes this in their Accession record), Physical Location Shelf/Box/Folder (archives notes this in their Accession record), Lily Location (archives notes this in their accession record), Seller and Provenance. 

Ronda did not suggest removing any of these field names, but she did divide and group them.  She combined Provenance, Seller and Donor Name into one category that she named Provenance.  She then tentatively grouped Acquisition Date and Donor notes into another category that she called Internal Technical/Administrative Information.  Location Code, Physical Location, Physical Location Shelf/Box/Folder and Lily Location were then all combined into a Location of Original category, along with Accession Number.  She felt that these were all used to identify the location of the original item or parent, but it was not completely clear from the descriptors how much they overlap.   

Brad then proposed combining six fields into one, but repeatable field: Alt ID, Call Number, Title Control Number (but this links to IUCAT), Donor ID, External URL (this links to something), and Roll and Frame #.  The main concern with removing these fields would be losing semantics if a field links or points to something. 

Ronda addressed these fields as well, but did not suggest considering their removal.  Again, she tried to group them semantically.  She combined Alt ID, Call Number, Donor ID and Roll and Frame #.  She sees this group as various ID numbers assigned specifically to the item (as opposed to the parent or collection unit).  Title Control Number and External URL were combined into a Supplemental Metadata category.  She questioned whether Accession Number could function similarly and therefore belong in that category as well.  She mentioned that the Title Control Number could potentially be used to link out to a collection-level MARC record.  External URL is more generic so it could maybe be used for both, but she points out that it could only work if the external resource could be identified. 

Brad questioned whether Abstract, Caption, Physical Description and Photographer’s Description could all be combined into one free-text field.  For example, “The physical description is albumen print. . .” or “The photographer described this photo, in full, blah. . .” 

Ronda grouped Abstract, Caption and Photographer’s Description into one category called Description.  She thought these could be changed into something more generic, maybe with a dropdown box to indicate the source (cataloger, caption, photographer, person pictured, etc.)   Ronda did not include Physical Description into that grouping, but rather into a category she named Description of Physical Object with other fields like Material and Film Type. 

Ronda’s other groupings that do not overlap with Brad’s ideas are on the Metadata Subgroup wiki.