A coincidence of events has highlighted the issue of collection level description:
On his recent visit to OCLC, Juha Hakala spoke about the work of The European Library (TEL) to develop CLDs for National Libraries.
Special attention has been paid to digital collections and collection level descriptions. TEL is a collection of collections and it was concluded that TEL would become a much more powerful search tool when collection level descriptions were offered integrated with metadata describing other objects. This should result in functionality that allows a presented collection description record to be transformed into a searchable target for the portal. [TEL Milestone Conference – WP3 Metadata]
The ARL Exposing Hidden Collections conference has posted a report:
There was animated discussion about a proposition that an outcome of the conference should be a pledge by participants to return to their institutions committed to provide a web-accessible collection-level record for all unprocessed materials. This was proposed as an initial effort that, if pursued by a large number of institutions, would represent a major stride toward making important content minimally accessible until more complete records could be produced. [Exposing Hidden Collections]
OCLC is looking at harvesting metadata from ContentDM and similar repositories. There is some interest in exploring whether there should be access to these collections through CLDs as well as item level aggregations.
MIMAS has released data creation guidelines for the JISC Information Environment Service registry. It contains guidelines for collections, services, and agents:
- Collections of information resources, the associated services that provide access to the collections, and the parties (aka agents) that own the collections and/or administer the services.
- Transactional services, i.e. those that provide functionality other than access to a collection and the parties that administer them.