defining collections and creating their descriptions
DESCRIPTION
Presentation for the workshop A bridge across Europe: linking collections at international level Discovering Collections, Discovering Communities, Birmingham, 29-30 October 2014 http://www.rluk.ac.uk/events/discovering-collections-discovering-communities/TRANSCRIPT
Defining collections and creating their descriptions
Valentine Charles
A bridge across Europe: linking collections at international level, Birmingham, October 2014
• The collection has items that have been gathered together in the past or will be gathered together in the future.
• Membership in a collection is determined by some criteria of the collector.
• The collection may be treated as an individual object in itself
What does The European Library consider as a collection?
According to the ENUMERATE survey 10-12% of content is digitised
Only 10% of the 132 million objects held at the Library of Congress digitised
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/business/yourmoney/11archive.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&
Digitisation still in progress…
Rich information and interesting items are digitally available but • are located in different services• have been developed by many projects and
for different purposes
Lack of contextual information: poor titles, lack of other metadata.
The information is still not connected
Information access in new digital services
Challenges for users
Researchers want to search in large corpora and find special items.
But• Collections relevant for researchers are not
always available in a digital form• Many collections are not known to research
communities
Visibility for non-digitised or even un- catalogued collections
• Special collections
Collection descriptions for resource access and discovery
Provide context for item-level resources
Create curated corpora based on specific topics
Use logical and curated information for improving search (relevance)
Representation of provenance information
A tool for resource management
Better expression of relations between item-level and collection resources
Management of new type of resources in digital environment: datasets, virtual exhibitions, users generated collections…• Creation of metadata records for collections of
items uncatalogued so far.
Management of the collections themselves:• acquisition periodicity• growth• subjects gaps• access Rights
Do you have such collections?Do you have structured descriptions for them?Would you like to share them?
Thank you
Valentine [email protected]
www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/ www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/tel4/access