As I discussed briefly at the meeting in New York, I have proposed a
session on some of the MOA2 work for the SAA meeting in Pittsburgh. The
descriptive portion of the proposal is attached FYI.
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Peter B. Hirtle
Assistant Director pbh6@cornell.edu
Cornell Institute for Digital Collections 607/255-4033 (ph)
2B Kroch Library 607/255-9524 (fax)
Cornell University <http://cidc.library.cornell.edu/
Ithaca, NY 14853
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STANDARDS FOR THE ENCODING OF DIGITAL ARCHIVAL OBJECTS
Bernie Hurley, UC Berkeley: "The Need for Structural and Administrative
Metadata Standards"
Peter Hirtle, Cornell: "Archivists Confront Encoded Objects"
Merrilee Proffitt, UC Berkeley: "Development of Tools for Capture and
Standardized Encoding: Implications, Problems, and Solutions"
Kris Kiesling, UT-Austin, Chair
Description of Proposal
A. Overall purpose of the session
The session is intended to introduce SAA members to efforts to discuss and
develop standards for creating and encoding digital surrogates of archival
objects. It will report on the preliminary findings of the Making of
America II Project, a Digital Library Federation-sponsored and
NEH-supported multi-institutional project to investigate important issues
in the creation of an integrated, but distributed, digital library of
archival materials. Participating institutions include the University of
California - Berkeley; Cornell; New York Public Library; Penn State; and
Stanford.
B. Intended audience, including skill level and topic category
The session will be of most interest to archivists engaged in or
contemplating the scanning of any portion of their collections. Some
knowledge of descriptive standards, including EAD, or digitization
procedures (text encoding or scanning) would be desirable.
C. Content description (50 words or less)
The session's speakers will report on the findings from a collaborative
project intended to identify and capture structural and administrative
metadata at the object level. Papers will discuss the background and
rationale for the project; identify the archival attributes that must
accompany digital archival objects; and describe tools developed for
capturing and using standardized metadata.
D. What participants will know and/or be able to do differently after
attending this session.
Participants will learn that merely scanning a series of pages may not
create a distributed digital archive. The individual image files must
also
be related to each other and to broader descriptive standards. The
approach to solving these issues discussed in this session may serve as a
model for similar projects.
E. Significance of the session (25 words or less)
It will introduce the SAA to the need for the standardization of the
encoding of digital archival objects, and suggest possible approaches to
follow.