Guidelines for Mapping to Core Categories for Image Services
DLXS Documentation 2002-03-13 11:22:09 EST Weise, John Guidelines for Mapping to Core Categories for Image Services class image dlxsdocs-image-dc-guidelines
Guidelines for Mapping to Core Categories for Image Services

DLXS help

Disclaimer: The guidelines in this document are somewhat specific to deployment of collections in the Image Services access system at the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service and should not be considered as a generally applicable interpretation of the Dublin Core.

Image Services uses a somewhat simplified implementation of Dublin Core. While the Dublin Core documentation is informative, the following table may be most useful when preparing data for Image Services.

Keep in mind that databases often have a mix of fields, some that describe the subject matter, and some that describe the physical item. In the case of a photograph of architecture, is the photograph the item or is the architecture the item? The answer to this varies depending on the database (and the curatorial decisions that went into creating the database). At any rate, it is issues like this that make the mapping process interesting and challenging.

Again, the goal is to map database/collection specific fields to the more general Dublin Core fields in order to make searching across all Image Services databases possible. The collection specific fields will also be searchable directly in a collection specific search. You may find that it helps to try some of the other collections that are online to see how they are mapped. Mappings are viewable by looking at a detailed record in the cross collection search. It is also useful to look at detailed records in the collection specific search to pick up nuances of each collection.

Core Category/Field Name

Types of Collection Specific Fields Commonly Mapped

Creator

  • Name of artist, architect, photographer, creator, etc.
  • Tombstone information for artist, architect, photographer, creator, etc.
  • Nationality of artist, architect, photographer, creator, etc.

Title

  • Titles, subtitles, project names.
  • When there is not a formal title, captions, location for architecture, and similar fields are sometimes mapped to Title.

Description

  • Fields that provide physical description of the item, such as medium, type, and dimensions.
  • Fields that describe the site or project history.

Subject

  • Keywords.
  • Subject Terms.
  • Other fields that describe the subject matter. What it is of, and what it is about.

Date

  • Creation date (or date range) that the item was created.
  • Date period (e.g., renaissance).

Rights

  • Copyright
  • Contact Info (for acquiring permission to use)

Source

  • Source. For example, if the image was copied from a book, it would be the bibliographic citation. If the image was acquired from a vendor, it would be the name of the vendor.

Publisher

  • The entity responsible for making the item available online. In Image Services, this is most commonly your organization (e.g., Bentley Historical Library, UM Museum of Art, etc.).

Other Categories/Field Names

Miscellaneous (not a Core field)

  • Any field that simply does not map well to the above options should probably be mapped to Miscellaneous. This allows the miscellaneous fields to also be displayed in cross collection searches.
  • There may be fields that simply should not be mapped to any core fields. It should be questioned whether or not these fields should be going online at all. If they should, then it is OK to not map them.

Main Entry

  • Title and Creator and Date.
  • It is mandatory that one or more fields be mapped to Main Entry and that at least one of the fields always contains data values. The Main Entry fields are used for displaying search results to the user in a cross collection search.