| 1. Introduction |
This paper reports on a project that applied existing metadata formats to a university museum's collection of fashionable and traditional costumes from the eighteenth through twentieth century. It is the purpose of this paper to share findings with regard to metadata applications to this collection, with the goal of providing online access to the descriptions and the digitized images.
Access to most collections of historical fashion is limited by the staff available to handle these delicate artifacts and by the inaccessible nature of many costume collection storage facilities. The advantage of making representative examples of extant costumes available in a digitized fashion collection is obvious. Digital access allows researchers, students, and the public to have visual access to an entire collection without needlessly disturbing the garments and their accessories. In comparison to what limited physical access can accomplish, the digital environment can greatly enhance intellectual access to the collection (DuMont & Druesedow, 1997). Recently, data regarding a variety of fashion collections have appeared on the World Wide Web. These websites include collections with a regional emphasis, sites representing major museum collections, and collections of particular kinds of clothing. There are also websites that have images of fashion prints and commercial sites that have images of historical and authentically reproduced clothing for the purpose of the sale of garments. (Please refer to Appendix A for a list of titles and URLs of fashion collection websites). Such websites demonstrate highly enhanced access and use of objects in collections through digitization and network technologies.
In late 1997, the Kent State University (KSU) Museum decided to put images and descriptions of selected objects from its fashion collection on its Web site. Founded in 1985, the KSU Museum houses approximately 20,000 examples of costume and decorative arts from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Fashionable dress and regional traditional dress constitute the most significant part of the museum's holdings and form a notable and comprehensive repository of costumes. For example, its 1820-1920 American Fashion collection illustrates clothing worn during America's most expansive period of social and political development, detailing the adoption of fashion that describes the evolution of American society. The museum also includes a collection of fur-lined Manchu robes of international importance. The museum objects carry rich information associated with history, culture, and society, as well as style, pattern, material, color, and technique.
However, while planning to build a digitized collection for these objects, the KSU Museum staff found that few repositories or related research reports examined issues that are inherent in the application of existing metadata standards to descriptions of three-dimensional objects for digitized collections. Two questions of central concern had to be addressed: (1) for non-textual and three-dimensional objects like fashions, do any metadata standards exist? (2) If not, which descriptive elements ought to be included in a metadata record for fashion collections?
In exploring the options for establishing a digitized fashion collection for display on the KSU Museum Web site, the author collaborated project leaders Rosemary DuMont, Director of the KSU New Media Services and Jean Druesedow, the KSU Museum Director. The author's major roles in the project were (1) to review existing metadata formats and to select one of these formats for the KSU Museum collection; (2) to augment this format as needed to meet the unique needs of the collection and its users; and (3) to prepare cataloging guidelines, examples, and a template for the museum registrar to develop and maintain the catalog for the entire digitized historical fashion collection. To fulfill these tasks, the author identified characteristics of the collection objects that require metadata treatment. These characteristics include the nature of the collection objects; anticipated user needs; and constraints (staffing, funding, equipment, interoperability with institutional and community information systems/services).