Executive Summary
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This paper reports on a project that applied existing metadata formats to Kent State University (KSU) Museum's collection of fashionable and traditional costumes from the eighteenth through twentieth century. In preparing a "digital collection" (a database or a website) to document these three dimensional objects, a traditional method-- cataloging - was employed to record the attributes of a fashion item in a structured way. 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. The unique characteristics of the fashion objects were examined and the way the data is accessed, presented, and researched by the known and potential users were analyzed.
The sample for testing metadata treatment was drawn from two special collections of the KSU Museum: (a) about eighty American costumes identified for a project entitled "What Americans Wore, 1820-1920", and (b) some typical items from the Manchu robes collection. In addition, twelve non-costume items including some furniture, decorative arts, bedding, and porcelain items were also included. The KSU Museum stores all fashion items in its warehouse. These items are usually documented with accession records or exhibition labels. Some have archival documents such as a donor's letter or a record of an item's exhibition history. From a set of 90 museum accession records, 42 objects were selected for cataloging.
Three metadata treatments were created for these 42 items using (1) the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR) in use with the United States MAchine-Readable Cataloging (USMARC) formats, (2) the Dublin Core set of elements designed for minimal level cataloging, and (3) the Visual Resources Association (VRA) Core Categories for Visual Resources created for developing local databases and cataloging records for visual resources collections. Two local considerations contributed to the selection of these formats: compatibility and simplicity.
The format testing stage consisted of four steps. First, fifteen costumes were selected and divided into three groups. For each group of five items, one of the three formats was applied as the primary format to create basic records. The records were then converted into the remaining two formats. As a result, each of the fifteen items had records in three formats. Second, records were analyzed to assess the strengths and weaknesses of each format when applied to a specific costume item. With the supplementary elements, the modified VRA Core format was selected to be applied to the entire prototype collection. Third, a modified data dictionary based on the VRA Core Categories was developed and a template for generating records was created. Twenty-seven additional items were cataloged to further test the template. Fourth, in anticipation that other union collections (such as the KSU Library's KentLINK and OhioLINK's Digital Media Center) might want to include KSU's fashion collection in their databases, two format-mapping tables (from the extended VRA Core format to USMARC and to Dublin Core formats) were developed for the purpose of conversion.
Museum objects have characteristics that differ from information packages in most other environment, and these affect the description in the surrogate record (Taylor, 1999, p.97). Existing metadata formats, such as those examined by the study, were primarily designed for document and document-like objects and for limited types of objects. They have not progressed enough to include much of the key information related to a historical fashion object. The analysis in this study reveals that USMARC's strength is that it provides an exhaustive format for description that allows a cataloger to present various kinds of notes and differentiate various subject heading courses, but its use requires a great deal of time and professional skill. Important fields for authorship, title, and publication information are difficult to apply because the museum objects are often imperfectly known at the time of accession and registering. On the other hand, Dublin Core provides an easy application to create minimum level records. However, to apply the Dublin Core to the fashion collection without supplementing more descriptive elements would be inappropriate. VRA Core's treatment of a variety of specific elements matches fashion characteristics better than the other two formats. Consequently, VRA Core, supplemented with a few additional elements and modified data definitions, was applied and was found to be the most suitable to the digitized KSU historical fashion collection. Initial experiment also showed that the extended VRA Core might also be suitable for other three-dimensional objects, pending further testing.
It is hoped that the experience presented here will be valuable to other researchers involved in similar projects of metadata development and integration efforts.