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DC was massive in museums in the 90s. I think there are still remnant uses today - stuff like schema is a good reason for thinking about on-page metadata and dc

by dmje 2y ago

DC was massive in museums in the 90s. I think there are still remnant uses today - stuff like schema is a good reason for thinking about on-page metadata and dc was a part of that. I was involved with a gov / lottery funded series of projects called “New Opportunities Fund” [0] which mandated DC markup. The exciting idea for us at the time was that we’d be able to create simple cross-site searchable assets. So we (I was at The Science Museum at the time) could create our project with 30k museum records in it, the NHM could make theirs and then ultimately someone could make a “portal” (ah, the 90s phrases are flooding back…) where users could search across all the NOF funded sites. To the best of my knowledge the portal part was never made - we all did the dc bit but nothing global emerged from NOF. There is (to this day) a conversation about how to allow this sort of interop across museum data. On the one side are SemWeb types, on the other lightweight microformat types. I’m massively over simplifying - but this is sort of how it goes. I’ve always been fairly much in the latter camp. DC and microformats are incredibly crude - when you say an object has a “date” for example it clearly needs qualifying. Date it was made? Found? Used? Bought? Etc… - BUT to me it’s better to have this crude description than the alternative which is some kind of deeply complex (and thus never to be agreed / implemented across tens/hundreds/thousands of museums) sort of “perfect” standard. Of course nowadays much of this is made irrelevant by good search, and the way the majority of people search the web. A general audience doesn’t actually want to search for all paintings made by x artist on y date - and when they do they’re content (for good or bad) to settle with Google results. And I guess AI will help. Maybe. There are still a lot of data interop projects in museums and cultural heritage - stuff like the Museums Data Service [1] is brand new, TANC [2] has been going a while - and many more out there. [0] https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/new-opportunities-fund https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/new-opportunitie... [1] https://museumdata.uk/ https://museumdata.uk/ [2] https://www.nationalcollection.org.uk/ https://www.nationalcollection.org.uk/

cratermoon 2y ago
> much of this is made irrelevant by good search Perhaps we're seeing a resurgence of interesting in good metadata as a result of the decline in quality of search? > A general audience doesn’t actually want to search for all paintings made by x artist on y date This a common fate of cataloging systems: they are made by archivists, for archivists. Most people aren't archivists, they are looking for something in the context of their particular use for the information. Sönke Ahrens in his book "How to Take Smart Notes" says, "Do they wonder where to store a note or how to retrieve it? The archivist asks: Which keyword is the most fitting? A writer asks: In which circumstances will I want to stumble upon this note, even if I forget about it? It is a crucial difference."

by dmje 2y ago

cratermoon 2y ago

> much of this is made irrelevant by good search Perhaps we're seeing a resurgence of interesting in good metadata as a result of the decline in quality of search? > A general audience doesn’t actually want to search for all paintings made by x artist on y date This a common fate of cataloging systems: they are made by archivists, for archivists. Most people aren't archivists, they are looking for something in the context of their particular use for the information. Sönke Ahrens in his book "How to Take Smart Notes" says, "Do they wonder where to store a note or how to retrieve it? The archivist asks: Which keyword is the most fitting? A writer asks: In which circumstances will I want to stumble upon this note, even if I forget about it? It is a crucial difference."