Bibliography and citations
- Chris Hoffman
- Jan Eklund (Unlicensed)
Needed by whom and when
Basic statements about who needs the functionality and by when.
PAHMA and UCJEPS: Some functions needed by the time they move to CollectionSpace as their production system
Overview
PAHMA, UCJEPS, and other collections need the ability to store bibliographic information about references that need to then be linked to objects, authority records, or possibly transactions. Whether a controlled vocabulary for citations is needed or whether a set of bibliographic fields is needed in various places is not yet clear.
Per 10/20/10 meeting: consider treating as an "object" more or less as media items are handled.
HAVRC -- Most HAVRC images are copy images created by the HAVRC photographer from books, serials, and other printed materials. A smaller proportion of collection images are licensed or purchased from commercial vendors, created by photographing unique objects brought in by requestors, received as donations by requestors, or in rare cases downloaded from the web. The point here is that HAVRC collection objects are collected from multiple sources. The ability to reference a source record to an intake, catalog, and media record is critical. To use Citation as the HAVRC Source authority would probably require that additional fields be added to the existing Citation schema to allow a more robust fielded structure for image sources that do not reference a Bibliographic citation. While we could follow CDWA guidelines[1] for content entry into a Citation (which has examples for citing websites, databases, donor information, etc.), there is no structural accommodation for data about original objects that belong to different owners or unknown/unclear sources (which often the case with retrospective migration and cataloging of collection images.)  The CDWA approach assumes that all data entry personnel are rigorous and scrupulous about how the content is formatted and entered for each source type. Multiple users make data entry inconsistency inevitable.
Question: What is a standard schema for bibliographic information that we can adopt? What kind of capabilities exist already in current systems? Is there existing data to migrate?
Citations authority UCB user stories for prioritization
Bibliography and citations: A standard set of bibliographic fields can be added to object records, authority records, or transaction records as a repeatable group so that citation information can be referenced in those records.
Bibliography and citations: Users can manage bibliographic information in a citation authority, and that controlled vocabulary can be related to object records, authority records, or transaction records. This will usually appear as one field in a repeatable group (e.g., with the page number in the citation that is relevant or a comment).
Bibliography and citations: HAVRC -- Many collections maintain a bibliography of sources that reference, either in the text or in an illustration, the objects in their collection. These sources are commonly cited in collection object records in a standard citation format. For a Visual Resource collection, where images that depict cultural objects are the collection objects, these citations serve a double purpose. They not only reference sources where the object in the image is either discussed or illustrated, they also serve as the source from which the descriptive metadata about the object has been derived. Unlike collections that employ subject specialists to create original descriptive metadata for original objects or specimens, Visual Resource collections generally derive descriptive metadata about objects depicted in an image from secondary sources.  Since Art Historians frequently disagree about attributions, creation dates, etc., it is important that Visual Resource collections be able to specify the source(s) for all information recorded in the database. While the vast majority of these citations reference traditional published print sources such as books and journal articles, data is also gleaned from a variety of unpublished sources such as faculty/scholar verbal opinions, personal research materials, electronic databases, and owner documentation that may arrive on or with the objects themselves. To use Citation as the HAVRC Source authority would probably require that additional fields be added to the existing Citation schema to allow a more robust fielded structure for image sources that do not reference a Bibliographic citation. While we could follow CDWA guidelines[1] for content entry into a Citation (which has examples for citing websites, databases, donor information, etc.), there is no structural accommodation for data about original objects that belong to different owners or unknown/unclear sources (which often the case with retrospective migration and cataloging of collection images.)  The CDWA approach assumes that all data entry personnel are rigorous and scrupulous about how the content is formatted and entered for each source type.
Prioritization of user stories
As definitions and priorities are clarified, the user stories above should be moved into relative order below.
Must have for 1.x-MUSEUM (when they go live in system)
Placeholder for required functionality. As a general rule, functionality that you need and use now should go here or where you have existing data. However, this is up to the museum. We will have to balance requirements against resources and timelines.
Placeholder
MUSEUM could wait six to twelve months
What could wait? These will be re-prioritized at a later date.
Placeholder
MUSEUM would like to have this eventually
These are nice to have but not a near term requirement.
Placeholder