Tag Archives: OLAC

MARC profiles for Language Archives

Posted on by
Reply

AACR2 and RDA both constitute application profiles using the same database structure known as MARC. MARC defines the fields and the expected values within those fields (type control) while AACR2 and RDA compose definitions of cognitive models and data fingerprinting (not the LIS terms for these concepts). By cognitive model I mean the mental representation of entities and their relationships and by fingerprinting of data I mean that some artifacts are "well described" when various fields are employed. E.g., a book description needs a publisher, while a manuscript does not.

AACR2 and RDA both constitute application profiles to which the documentation is only provided on a subscription basis. This is a pay-to-play game. This sort of game is not well received by the language documentation community. These facts do no mean that preservation organizations need to avoid MARC, rather a MARC profile could be established and documented in the open.

When considering the future of OLAC and language resource archiving an outstanding question emerges, is this sort of profile something that is of interest within the community?

Dublin Core Subject field

Posted on by
Reply

Dublin Core has a subject element. But what constitutes a subject?

Two points on this:

  1. Subject-hood is a complex notion. As pointed out by Birger Hjørland included in this concept can be both is-ness and about-ness. LIS theory can say to divide these concepts, but if Dublin Core as a descriptive framework does not allow this, then the notion of subjecthood should be assumed to include both notions.
  2. Pictures (still images, including paintings) are complex when evaluating their subject hood. First, when a picture depicts something then it is reasonable to say that the picture is about that thing, as well as the picture is something...

I am suggesting that Dublin Core as a standard does not distinguish between about-ness and is-ness with regard to subject. And to further make matters complicated about-ness and is-ness merge more in visual media than in other types of print based media.

The following articles indirectly address the distinction of about-ness and is-ness or address about-ness in visual media.

Rushton, M. Public Funding of Controversial Art. Journal of Cultural Economics 24, 267–282 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007682121108

Wall, J. M. (2005). The Medium & the Message: Theology and Film. Theology Today, 62(1), 74–77. https://doi.org/10.1177/004057360506200109

Wanda Klenczon & Paweł Rygiel (2014) Librarian Cornered by Images, or How to Index Visual Resources, Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 52:1, 42-61, DOI: 10.1080/01639374.2013.848123

in a book
Emerging Frameworks and Methods: CoLIS 4 : Proceedings of the Fourth

Andrea Witcomb (1997) On the Side of the Object: an Alternative Approach to Debates About Ideas, Objects and Museums, Museum Management and Curatorship, 16:4, 383-399, DOI: 10.1080/09647779700501604

Wang, X., Song, N., Liu, X. and Xu, L. (2021), "Data modeling and evaluation of deep semantic annotation for cultural heritage images", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 77 No. 4, pp. 906-925. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-06-2020-0102

Platform tools for OAI harvesting

Posted on by
Reply

So, in recent OLAC presentation I talked about enabling Omeka or Drupal via recipes for OAI harvesting. Here is some links to internet chatter on these issues.

Koha

enable Items in KOHA OAI Harvesting

https://koha-community.org/manual/18.05/en/html/webservices.html

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/38956/export-of-zotero-citation-to-marc-format-for-import-into-koha-lms

wordpress

Day 13: Harvest data with OAI-PMH

WordPress and Drupal

https://acrl.ala.org/techconnect/post/creating-an-oai-pmh-feed-from-your-website/

eHive

https://developers.ehive.com/

Catmandu

https://librecatproject.wordpress.com/tutorial/

Omeka
https://omeka.org/classic/docs/Plugins/OaiPmhRepository/

MOAI
https://pypi.org/project/MOAI/

PyOAI
https://pypi.org/project/pyoai/

OLAC and PREMIS

Posted on by
Reply

During the presentation yesterday on PREMIS, which I liked very much, it seemed that a multi-author survey of archival institutions which conduct media transference and also participate in OLAC, would be an interesting group project which would have publishable results.

Such a project might have three components:

  1. A “crosswalk style” mapping between PREMIS data values or fields and where those may appear in the OLAC profile. (How would one know if this information were available? or put another way, if an institution were to use this framework how could they publish that metadata via the OLAC profile?)
  2. A review of current practice as evidenced by what we can see in OLAC records. (Are institutions contributing this metadata? and in what capacitiy?)
  3. A questionnaire or interview with specific institutions conducting digitization. Offhand I think the following do digitization: Alaska Native Language Archive, Kaipuleohone,  SIL L&CA, PARIDESIC, Oxford Text Archive, and the COllections de COrpus Oraux Numeriques (CoCoON ex-CRDO). (In what ways are institutions solving the problems that PREMIS helps to solve?) 
https://www.loc.gov/standards/premis/

No hCite format defined

Posted on by
Reply

I am looking to re-skin Wikindex. I thought that I would add some CSS classes that would embed the meta-data in a manner that the citations could be picked up by Zotero quite easily. It seems to be a bit more difficult than I first anticipated. As a Microformat for citations is not yet been fully fleshed out. Obviously one way to go would be to embed everything in a span element as COinS does but that is not really what I am looking for. (Mostly because I don’t have a way to generate the Attributes in the span element automatically.) I have thought of using RDFa. But I still need to do some more research and see what can be gleaned in terms of which controlled vocabularies to use. I am hoping that this Lesson On RDFa will really help me out here. Finally I do need to know something about OAI so that once the Resources are put into Wikindex I can then tell OLAC what language they belong to.