[Coll_Collab] Forum on NCD Project - January 24
Martha L Smalley
martha.smalley at yale.edu
Thu Jan 3 10:38:56 EST 2008
Save the date....
The Yale Collections Collaborative
(http://www.yale.edu/collections_collaborative/) will be sponsoring a
forum on the Natural Collections Description Project on January 24th
from 10:30 a.m. to noon in the Peabody Museum Auditorium, featuring
presentations by Carol Butler (Smithsonian Institution), Neil Thomson
(the Natural History Museum,London) and Roger Hyam (Royal Botanic
Garden Edinburgh). Although the NCD Project is focused on natural
history collections, the concepts and methodology of the project will
be of interest to anyone who deals with metadata and the challenges
of describing and relating groups of materials. See below for more
information.
If you would like to have an opportunity to join the presenters for
lunch and more detailed discussion in the afternoon, please let me know.
The NCD Project
Collection descriptions are electronic records that document the
holdings of an organization as groups of items and complement the
more traditional item-level records such as are produced for a single
specimen or a library book. The NCD Interest Group has developed a
data standard, called Natural Collections Description (NCD) for
describing entire collections of natural history materials; one NCD
record describes one entire collection, including information about
the collection, access and usage of the collection and where to get
more detailed information. NCD brings together work on collections
descriptions being carried out for the European Union Framework VI
program SYNTHESYS with the work performed by RAVNS under the auspices
of RLG Programs.
A brief descriptive record as defined by the NCD standard can act as
the "business card" for a collection, providing enough information to
identify and locate it. The standard enables the aggregation of
collections descriptions from many sources and facilitates resource
discovery. Another discovery use is that relationships among
collections in several locations can be established using NCD records.
NCD is a lightweight resource description standard specific to
natural history collections, such as specimens, original artwork,
archives, observations, library materials, datasets, photographs or
mixed collections such as those that result from expeditions and
voyages of discovery. NCD primarily holds information about
collections of objects, but can also be used to describe
organizations (collections of collections) and networks (collections
of organizations). NCD is between general resource discovery
standards such as Dublin Core (DC) and rich collection description
standards such as the Encoded Archival Description (EAD). It will be
possible to extract a Dublin Core record from an NCD record for use
with general resource discovery systems. It is also possible to use
an NCD record as the seed for a richer collection description, like EAD.
Martha Lund Smalley
Special Collections Librarian / Curator of the Day Missions Collection
Yale Divinity School Library
409 Prospect St. New Haven, CT 06511
Phone 203 432-5289 Fax 203 432-3906
Martha.Smalley at yale.edu
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