DC-8 Breakout Session Collection Description Issues

Background

As illustrated by the five themed articles in the September 2000 issue of D-Lib Magazine, there is a growing interest in the description of materials at the collection level. The creation of collection descriptions allows the owners or curators of collections to disclose information about their existence and availability to interested parties. Such descriptions may enable:

• users to discover and locate collections of interest,
• users to perform searches across multiple collections in a controlled way,
• the refinement of distributed searching approaches based on the characteristics of candidate collections,
• software to perform such tasks on behalf of users, based on known user preferences.

In the context of this discussion it is anticipated that the term 'collection' applies to any aggregation of individual items. This includes collections of physical items, digital surrogates for physical items and born-digital items as well as collections of metadata about such items. For example:

• library collections
• museum collections
• archives
• library, museum and archival catalogues
• digital archives
• Internet directories (Yahoo, OpenDirectory)
• Internet subject gateways (SOSIG, EEVL, ISAAC network)
• robot generated Web indexes (Google, Alta Vista)
• collections of text, images, sounds, datasets, software, other material or combinations of these (this includes databases, CD-ROMs and collections of Web resources);
• other collections of physical items.

Session overview

This breakout session will provide a forum within which issues related to the description of such a wide ranging, cross-sectoral set of collection types can be discussed.

The aim of the session is to:

• offer an opportunity for those working with descriptions at the collection level to share their experiences and approaches,
• determine whether a DCMI working group is likely to form an appropriate forum for the discussion of cross-sectoral collection description issues,
• if so, discuss the aims and charter of such a working group,
• agree the functional aims of collection description in the context of the DCMI,
• identify the likely points of contact between a collection description working group and other areas of DCMI activity,
• investigate whether the DC element set forms an appropriate basis for simple collection description and/or whether application-specific extensions to that set are required.

Reading and materials

No materials are formally required for this breakout session. However, attendees are encouraged to familiarise themselves with the articles in the current issue of D-Lib.

If you are planning to attend and would like a short (5-10 minute) slot to present your collection description experiences, it would be helpful if you could notify a.powell@ukoln.ac.uk before Sunday 1 October. Thanks!