Standards and the digital life cycle NOF Digitisation Workshops September 2000 Alice Grant Consulting Including additional notes and URLs

The great, the good (and the odd one that got away…) Standards and the digital life cycle

Creation –The digital capture process –Metadata Access –Access for all? –Fit for purpose? –Technologies –Vocabularies –Points of view –Across domains Management –Digital preservation Reuse The future

Creation the digital capture process Integrate standards into your workflow Evaluate different working methodologies Get the right tools for the job – save time and money Standards expertise – work together to develop skills Maintaining your digital archive – consider shared facilities

Creation metadata Management uses –Process control –Rights management –Access PORT – National Maritime MuseumPORT Go to and see how this museum has invested in metadata creation to create a rich and diverse resource. Making of America This project initiated by the Digital Libraries Federation has resulted in over half a million high-definition images of bibliographic and manuscript material being made available online –Management shows how metadata has been used to describe & manage resourcesManagement –Access shows the end resultAccess

Management digital preservation No guarantee of any format or media being preserved for the future Agree your policy and manage the implementation process Keep eyes and ears open - review policies Select the best storage media for the job Open platform – or at least an open door Safety in numbers

Management digital preservation Just because it’ll last till Domesday doesn’t mean it’ll be any use…Domesday Read about this sorry tale at

Management digital preservation Are your storage media transferable? Are you regularly running out of space? Can you and your users access material quickly enough? Can your file formats be read by different software? Are your digital assets individually accessible? Are your users happy with the quality of digital resources? Are your data files encoded? Can you export them?

Access users Who will be using it? What for? –General interest or study? –Take a look at the SCRAN images and how they are presented – as a light-box, in detail, for browsing – consider the type of access your users will need. What with (or without)? –Choose your technology with care –Don’t use plug-ins or expect technologies which most people won’t have – if you must, then cater too for low-end specifications screens like this site Special needs? –e.g. visual impairment –The British Museum’s COMPASS site includes text-only delivery able to be read by speech synthesisers

Access vocabularies No consistency, no accessconsistency The Getty has extensive vocabularies, including artists’ names, geographic names and the wide-ranging Art & Architecture Thesaurus. Research existing resources Plan to invest time and effort… …it’ll be worth it in the endworth Check out the Tate site and search their collections for an example of how investment in quality of information brings results –

Access points of view What kind of user? Expert? The HiBrowse project is an example of expert-oriented searching enabled by thesaural control - Subject specialist? Novice? – –an example of an innovative, more intuitive approach to browsing, based on the user’s point of view

Access across domains Dublin Core –Resource location –High-level, broad descriptions –Convergence in actionaction CIMI – the Consortium for Computer Interchange of Museum Information undertook a major testbed of Dublin Core, accessing resources from museum, archive, archaeological & library collections -

Reuse Ensure creation of separately accessible and documented assets Avoid authorware as a storage medium Disaggregate resources for re-use –e.g. slides within PowerPoint –e.g. images within compiled programs such as Director

Thinking about the future WAP – - use the Wapalizer to view existing WAP siteshttp:// –What kind of information? –How much? –What format? XML – the key to the future? XML DTD for the Museum standard SPECTRUM is currently under review – it aims to enable a wide range of functions, including: –Migration –Integration