From: David Bearman [dbear@amico.org]
Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2000 6:05 PM
To: Carl Lagoze; 'meta-harmony@mailbase.ac.uk'
Subject: Archival and Museum cataloging for the Example and some observations
Dear All,

From the beginning, in scoping the project, we've acknowledged that "one's person's metadata is another persons data". The truth ad significance of thids observation however doesn't come home until we actually examine the prospects of developing a "metadata meaning resolving tool" such as we were srtiving to define in the ABC workshop and test it against concrete metadata about the same "real world thing" from several nearby communities of practice.

We agreed to define the metadata for a 130 min video (VHS) of a "Live at Lincoln Center Performance".  The conductor is Kurt Masur.  The Orchestra is the New York Philharmonic.  The performance was on April 7, 1998 at 8PM Eastern Time.  The video was produced by PBS and broadcast live on the BBC.  The TV director was Brian Large and the sound recordist was Lydia Bancroft. The narration and program notes are by Martin Bookspan and in English.  The three pieces performed were are:
- The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky, written in 1911.  Its length is 35 minutes
- Beethoven Symphony No. 9, written in 1824.  Its length is 65 minutes
-Concerto for Violin by Phillip Glass written in 1992.  With Robert McDuffie solo on the Violin.  Its length is 25 minutes.
Copyright for the entire performance is held by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

Taking the task from an archivists perspective, and from a museum curators perspective, I found that almost none of the 'data' provided in the story we concocted would provide information needed to populate the required metadata categories for either domain. Consequently, almost none of the data values would be discoverable from the resulting metadescriptions. Some of the information might have been found in data accompanying the object if an unusual archival degree of processing had occurred or extensive exhibition catalog had been written for the museum, but this would be incidental/accidental to metadocumentation and, in any case, would be in unstructured description fields..

Technically there are four institutions in our story whose archives could contain the referenced records. The archival cataloging would be different for each of these four fonds ( the New York Philharmonic, the Lincoln Center, NPR and BBC), even if we imagined they all followed the same cataloging conventions. For simplicity I've illustrated how different two of them might be. Arthur is going to show us what BBC says.

To illustrate the point a bit further, I've gopne to extremes and made up stories of why this item might be in a local histoprical society (archival collection) and in the local art museum and catalogued them appropriately.

In the New York Philharmonic Archives:
Series: Performance Recordings
Subseries: 1998 Subscription
Title: April 7, 1998
Format: 1" PAL video

Series: Programming
Subseries: Guest Conductors
Subseries: Kurt Masur
Title April 7, 1998
Description: Concert master correspondence regarding a program planned for April 7, 1998 in New York, includes draft and final program notes and published performance reviews.

In Lincoln Center Archives:
Series: House
Subseries: Main Stage
Subseries: Videos
Title: April 7, 1998 8PM
Description: New York Philharmonic conducted by Kurt Masur
 
An historical society or repository of personal papers might have the same recoding cataloged as:

Fonds/Collection Title: James Wadson Papers
Series: Special Occasions
Subseries: 50^th anniversary
Folder Title: Momentos
Format: ½" videotaope, NTSC
Description: Concert at Lincoln Center attended by the Wadson's on their 50^th anniversary.

An art museum could have it cataloged as:

Artist: Put U On (1973-    )
Title: Quiet evening, Living Room
Date: 2000
Medium: Work in sound, 4.5 hrs
Description: The third of five works in the "Artist-Nights" series. In an interview accompanying at the first public exhibition of the series at Cleveland Museum of Art, the artist described this piece as "the unusual calm in the center of the noisy storm of life. The artists returns home, runs a bath upstairs, makes a light salad in the kitchen, reads well into the night."
Credit: Purchased by the Womens Committee Avant Garde fund
Accession: 2000.87.3


The point of these examples, which are probably reasonably representations of archival and museum cataloging for the facts given us by Carl, are two-fold:
1)      the values he reports may not ever show up in any metadata category depending on the rules (perspectives) of the domain doing the description. This is reflected also in the AACRII cataloging provided by Tom Demsey
2)      the metadata categories which are presumed by the way Carl gave us the data, like "title" may not refer to the same thing at all in different traditions of description.

For the moment, until we get the rest of the examples together, I'll not reflect on just what that means to our project.
David