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About this theme
Use of appropriate standards; formats and identifiers is key to achieving discoverability, access and impact. It was clear from our survey responses that institutions who set out to digitise parts of their collection, unsurprisingly, tend to use the most appropriate format for the material they are digitising. Using standard formats also supports digital preservation. The Taskforce recommends that International Image Interoperability Framework and identifiers be encouraged in order to facilitate interoperability.
Data quality is a concern. In historic cultural collections of all kinds, data about objects may be inadequate, incomplete or non-existent. When applying standards to transcribing or capturing fields of data, there need to be ways to distinguish consistently, for example, between data that is missing and that is redacted, for example, because of The General Data Protection Regulation. Metadata indicators or descriptions of quality or provenance may be helpful. Systematic sharing of best practice would help here, including use of data fields; quality assurance processes including those for images; and workflows to minimise human error.
While the taskforce remit placed emphasis on examining or developing common standards, in practice there was neither need nor desire for new standards. It was felt that there are already effective standards in place as well as organisations who manage and promote them. The key issue is to improve the extent to which they are used and understood, as well as ensuring that the UK collections sector are well represented in the (often international) efforts continuously to improve these standards. For example, the National Conservation Service (NCS) launched in May 2019 a new Quality Mark for Trusted Digitisation, aiming to “help those seeking digitisation providers by offering clauses that cover how items and collections will be protected by the digitisation provider, from the point of collection and its return…those that apply and are assessed as meeting the standards will be awarded NCS Quality Mark designation”.
Recommendations
Recommendation 5: There should be improved dissemination of standards through the provision of a Digital Resources Portal, and knowledge sharing via the Centres of Excellence.
The Network will:
- Continue to contribute to the development of approaches on persistent identifiers , for example the project undertaken by the Towards a National Collection programme (see also Recommendation 1).
The Natural History Museum
Case study: Sharing Natural History Museum collections data
Understanding global patterns of biodiversity requires a standardised view of the data from natural history collections and observations across the globe. These data derive from a myriad of sources stored in various formats on many distinct hardware and software platforms. The Natural History Museum, alongside members of the wider international community, are members of the Taxonomic Databases Working Group, who developed the Darwin Core standard to facilitate the publishing and integration of biodiversity information. This standard, deriving from previous standards work (e.g., Dublin Core), describes core sets of characteristics of biodiversity, which are applicable in many biological domains. The terms are organised into categories covering broad aspects (e.g. event, location, geological context, occurrence, taxon, and identification) of the biodiversity domain or relationships to other resources (e.g. measurements and generic information).
A map showing the 1.88 billion data points made available through GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, thanks to the international development and adoption of the Darwin Core data standard.
Darwin Core’s development spans more than a decade, and is flexible enough to accommodate a variety of ever evolving technical contexts in which it might be used. The standard has to be adaptable to accommodate growth (new terms, additional meanings) and interoperability (connections to related information). This is partly achieved through the use of formal “extensions” providing additional terms describing a complementary, related domain information. While the standard has limitations, it has enabled the exchange of almost 2 billion records from 60 thousand datasets across the globe, and underpins a tens of thousands of scientific papers that requires knowledge on the past and present distributions of species.
The Ashmolean, University of Oxford
Case study: Use of standards and systems to support cross-collections search
The Ashmolean ‘Digital Collections Programme’ has been dedicated to making the museum’s collections available online since 2015. Following a hub-and-spoke model, a central team containing both technical and collections expertise have initiated a range of cross-functional activity focussed on the development and maintenance of digital collections content and associated systems and processes at the museum.
While projects often require very specific solutions, the standardisation of particular elements across the programme guarantee cross-searchability and interoperability once collections are published for research, teaching and discovery online.
The implementation of a grading system of bronze, silver and gold for digital collection records provides a pragmatic approach to ensuring both inventory requirements for collections management as well as cataloguing and photography requirements for research and public engagement are met. It also provides a method to quickly identify problem areas and their solution, allocate and prioritise resource, track progress, and support accountability and advocacy of digitisation activity at institutional level.
The associated Data Validation System was built from a specification based on the museum’s data and image standards coupled with industry benchmarking and institutional learning from previous digital collection projects. This system has facilitated automation of both data analysis and wrangling so that digital records can meet institutional and sector standards. Collection records identified as reaching bronze, silver or gold level are then drawn from internal systems for publication to the ‘Collections Online’ website.
The museum’s parallel implementation of a central Digital Asset Management system and migration to a new Collections Management System, alongside the introduction of new publication, licensing, and preservation policies and processes – which are projects being run in collaboration with the University’s ‘GLAM Digital Strategy Programme‘ – aims to provide a robust infrastructure for the sharing and linking of our digitised collections content.
Over two hundred thousand records from across the museum’s diverse collections have thus far been prepared and published online on the Ashmolean’s current Collections Online platform. The systems and standards that underpin this digitisation activity will ensure sustainability and scalability as well as a certain level of data integrity to provide reliable and representative search results that can enable a global audience to discover our world-class collections.