Things I might have tweeted, part 4: new developments in describing av materials #marac

Jane Otto, Rutgers: Av description in a digital repository. New Jersey Digital Highway is the digital repository for all of nj.OpenWMS is the platform that they use. Web based and.open source. Uses the METS metadata schema. Descriptive metadata is MODS, which is MARC-lite, but extended by the institution. Build content by targeting faculty whose products are not typically accepted for publication: datasets, video, audio, etc. Works with faculty to develop custom metadata fields to creat searchability wihin small collections in the digtal repository. They also add fields for specific classes and specific assignments within a class. Sounds like a great service, but a lot of work. Megan McShea, Archives of American Art The problem is that there are no published standards for describing av materials at the non-item level. Archivists often describe av format instead of by topic, which is not helpful. Since there are only item level guidepines, many av records are over described. Poor av description is creatong a hidden backlog within processed collections. Used DACS as a basis for guidelines for processing av material. Like paper records, av should be kept in their intellectual place, not lumped into a series at the end. IASA gives decent list of standardized format names. Margaret Kruesi, Library of Congress DACS-SR, Companion content standard for describing sound recordings (although this is unrelated to the current revision of DACS) What are archival sound recordings? Unpublished, ethnographic, broadcast, one of a kind, rare published materials. Researchers want much more data from catalogers. Want to create a standard that can be used by non-specialists. Drafts of addiions to current DACS sections are mostly complete.