Hi everybody,
thanks for the interesting discussion on CMS and accessioning objects
with a parts to whole relationship. I'd like to tease out some issues
that Roland Dreyer's post has alluded to.
He essentially talks about accession numbers as the basic building
block for a filenaming convention. In and of itself, using accession
numbers in filenames is a worthy topic for discussion - I know a lot
of museums who create their unique filenames by using the accession
number, and I also know from a session at VRA San Francisco I
attended in 2000 that there are those who are up in arms against this
practise. The pro of using the accession number as part of a digital
filename is the instantaneous identification effect - without any
further ado, I know what object this file represents. The cons are
that using accession numbers in filenames amounts to embedding
descriptive metadata in the filename, and that this type of metadata,
even something as seemingly stable as an accession no, may change;
plus what Roland outlined, namely that certain accession numbers may
not be fit to be used as a filename. At BAM/PFA, we still believe
that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, and we're using a
convention that goes like this:
InstAcronym_AccessionNo_SequentialNo_VersionNo.FiletypeExt, or
bampfa_1992.4.234_1_1.tif. The Sequential Number is counting off the
digital images taken of the same object; Version Number is referring
to whether a file is a master, sub-master, access or thumbnail file.
However, back to the topic at hand. Whether you're dealing with a
parts-to-whole relationship in your CMS or not, you'll have to deal
with it once you digitize your collections. Even if your tea-set has
one accession number in your CMS, you may want to take individual
surrogate images of each (sub)item in it. Furthermore, objects for
which no registrar would create several entries or a groupentry or
subentries in a CMS will yield more than one master image file, for
example the various views of a sculpture; the individual pages of an
artist's book; the front and back of a painting (if the back has a
historical interesting inscription) etc.
To come full circle, I do believe that a discussion about issues of
how to create records for these "complex" objects (and potentially
*any* object is a complex object) has to tie in with a discussion
about creating digital surrogates and managing them. One of the most
basic challenges of managing digital assets is to keep the link
between the surrogate and the descriptive metadata pertaining to the
physical object intact.
Just to give a brief example of how the decision to accession the
tea-set may influence online access to the digital surrogate - if you
were to create separate records for each part of the tea-set as in
option 1 William outlined, you'd wind up with a situation where it
would be hard for your access architecture / strategy to know that
those objects should really be presented as one group with individual
children. You probably wouldn't be able to preserve the meaningful
grouping of the items in your presentation. If you follow strategy 2
and catalogue in a parent-child manner, you've definitely mad more
explicit that those items should be presented together, but then when
it comes time to digitize them, you may find out that the divisions
the CMS makes can not be "replicated" in digital images - the CMS may
have one entry the cup and saucer, whereas the photographer feels
that they need to be shot separately because there's something on the
saucer the cup covers if you shot them together.
I realize this is getting pretty ridiculous :-), but I think you get
the general drift - databases managing digital images and collections
management system have to be tightly integrated to operate
efficiently, and the parent / child question is one of the many
delicate issues in this integration - where is this relationship
hosted? In the CMS, or in the Digital Asset Managemeny System? At
BAM/PFA, we use our Digital Asset Management Database to provide
parent/child relationships for digital files - we go from the one
record in the CMS to the many records which might be required for the
digital surrogates. However, whenever I encounter objects with many
different records in the CMS, it breaks my system as described above.
I think we need to have a discussion between curators / registrars
and digital archive managers on how digital imaging might impact
current practises of acessioning the physical objects, and how we
think about CMS.
Just my humble 2c's. Thanks for listening - you've made it to the end!
Cheers,
Guenter
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Guenter Waibel
Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive
Digital Media Developer http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/
Digital Imaging SIG Chair, MCN http://www.mcn.edu/visig_subscribe.taf
[email protected]
Phone 510-643-8655
Fax 510-642-4889
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