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Sharing Images and Data: Making Access to Collection Easier and Better

Moderated by Ken Hamma, Executive Director, Digital Policy, J. Paul Getty Trust

This session was focused on art museums and cultural collections, and their attempts at digital preservation. The presenters were:

  • Barbara Thompson, Witt Librarian, Courtland Art Institute, London discussed her efforts in digital preservation of art using a database for tracking.
  • Murtha Baca, Head, Getty Vocabulary Program, Getty Research Institute, presented on “Sharable Metadata for Non-bibliographic Materials”. Baca argued for what she called “cross-cultural” use of standards-that is, using more than one metadata schemes together in one record (MARC and CCO). Baca said that an emerging trend was to use metadata that was both sharable and purposeful. Harvestable metadata, using the OAI/PMH protocol is also an emerging trend.
  • Erin Coburn, Manager of Collections Information at the J. Paul Getty Museum, discussed data standards and early attempts to create data standards for art- AMICO. Erin was pushing the Getty’s new product, co-developed with OCLC called CDWA lite-an XML schema to describe works of art using the OAI (Open Archives Initiative) harvesting protocol. (CDWA = Categories for the Description of Works of Art).
  • Gunther Waibel, Program Officer, OCLC Programs and Research Division, presented on OAI Imlementations using two tools:
    1. Creating CDWA Lite XML
    2. Leverage OAI Cat– Sharing your collection
  • Sarah Shreeves, Coordinator for the Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (IDEALS), presented on OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. Shreeves stated that a problem that exists is a user has to access each collection individually. The OAI Protocol for metadata harvesting provides an integrated access to metadata many items in a collection. Shreeves has an article on sharable metadata:
    1. Shreeves, S.L., Jenn Riley, and Liz Milewicz (2006). “Moving Towards Sharable Metadata.” First Monday 11 (8).