Contents:
- 1 Intro Metadata
- 2 Guidelines for Contemporary Art Metadata
- 3 Data Structure Standards
- 4 Data Value Standards
- 5 Guidelines for Metadata Exchange of Contemporary Art
- 6 DCA Vocabulary
- 7 Metadata and Long-Term Preservation
- Bibliography
This deliverable from the project Digitising Contemporary Art (DCA) starts with a short introduction on different types of metadata (seven types are acknowledged), the different levels of describing a digital resource and four different metadata encodings (XML, RDF, Turtle and OWL). The metadata standards per domain are mentioned briefly. Section 2 provides guidelines for describing contemporary art for cataloguing purposes. It introduces a model and gives practical advice to describe the artwork, the related documentation and their (digital) representations separately. It also advises that one compile one’s own set of metadata standards as the base for describing objects and resources and to extend these metadata standards with some institution specific metadata elements. In section 3 the relevant metadata standards are described, including their advantages and disadvantages (CDWA, Spectrum, MARC21, ISAD(G), EAD, EN15907, EN15744 and the exchange standards METS, OAI-ORE and LIDO). Section 4 gives a short description of the following widely used controlled vocabularies: AAT, TGN, ULAN and RKDArtists – again mentioning their main (dis)advantages. Section 5 outlines guidelines for exporting contemporary art metadata to Europeana (section 5.1) and on media art to the aggregator GAMA (section 5.2). The requirements for both aggregators are applied to LIDO in order to provide an application profile suitable for the metadata exchange of contemporary art. It is expected that the LIDO profile for fine arts will eventually become the main metadata exchange model for contemporary art. Until then, DCA’s specific LIDO application profile is recommended. In section 6 the authors of the DCA project team provide recommendations for the use of controlled vocabularies for the following elements or fields: the artwork types, event types, surrogate types, keywords, and an actor’s role. The deliverable finishes with a short listing of the risks of long-term digital archiving and a brief description of the PREMIS preservation standard.
The relevancy of this deliverable lies particularly in the presentation of the layered description framework for artworks, based on FRBR, and its application to contemporary art (section 2). Furthermore, the guidelines for exporting metadata on contemporary art to Europeana (section 5.1) or on media art to aggregator GAMA (section 5.2) are practical and useful, as the recommended metadata model for exchanging contemporary art metadata allows the retention of different descriptive levels for the digital contemporary art resource as well as the export of the descriptions as best as possible. Also, the recommendations on the use of controlled vocabularies enhance access to artworks in the various collections.For readers new to the metadata (standards) domain, the other sections give a first impression of what is relevant in the metadata domain concerning artworks.