Week 16: Back at it!

This week I was back at the DLP after winter break.  I was looking forward to getting back to work especially since I felt like I was on a roll before with the Image Collections Online work.  Immediately I got into the process of beginning to define the Photocat core fields and put that information into the Wiki.  Before I had left for winter break, the Metadata Working Group had narrowed the core set down to 12 fields.   Now, the core set had expanded a bit, to 16 fields.  The working group added ACCESSION_NUMBER, CALL_NUMBER, DATE_TAKEN and STATUS.  These fields were added after we received feedback from collection managers and other users of Photocat. 

In addition to defining the core fields, I moved onto defining the remaining non-core fields.  These include over 75 fields that are either too specific to a collection to be included in the core, or are just not used very frequently by any collection.  The definitions for these fields were a little more complicated due to the fact, as mentioned before, that many of them are collection specific.  There were other fields that were a bit confusing.  The difference between PHOTOGRAPHER_STUDIO and PHOTOGRAPHIC_AGENCY is negligible and to write a clear definition that captures that slight distinction is difficult.  But it is necessary to do in order to provide catalogers with the best possible field to describe their collection. 

On top of working on ICO stuff, I also continued work on Schematron for the body of the document.  These are slightly different and while there are not as many checks, the XPath and queries may be a bit more difficult.  I can tell I am really using my XPath skills and understanding-of-XML-document chops.