Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
1 Associate Professor, Department of Knowledge and Information Science, University of Qom, Qom, Iran
2 Assistant Professor, Department of Knowledge and Information Science, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran
3 MSc. in Knowledge and Information Science, University of Qom, Qom, Iran
Abstract
Introduction
The use of metadata in various information contexts such as cultural heritage contexts (libraries, museums, and archives) requires proper management. Using metadata, especially during the production or before publication of the content objects, is an appropriate solution; because it provides the ability to identify, evaluate, select, explore, and manage content objects in various information storage and retrieval systems. Each library and information center needs a range of metadata standards to manage content objects and facilitate and expedite access to them. In most cases, a single standard cannot meet all needs or support all intended functions. In other words, not all elements of a metadata standard are applicable to a particular library or information center. The solution offered by the information and knowledge organization field, especially the metadata field, is an application profile to solve the problem of the non-applicability of a metadata standard and its set of elements in a particular library or information context.
The Library, Museum, and Archive of the Holy Shrine of Hazrat Masoumeh (A.S.) have a collection of valuable ancient resources and objects, which its printed resources and written heritage have been organized, and their bibliographic information is available for viewing and use by clients through the Azarsa Software. A vast number of written and audiovisual documents, along with over 7,000 historical artifacts, have been registered and recorded in this center. The purpose of the current research was to design a metadata application profile for describing and organizing (processing) the content objects of the Library, Museum, and Archive of the Holy Shrine of Hazrat Masoumeh (A.S.).
Literature Review
Application profiles emerged after criticisms were made about the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) for being simple and proposals to expand or complete it through other metadata standards (Tennis, 2015). Application profiles provide a mechanism to extract the elements required, appropriate to the characteristics of a database or information centers, link between these elements, and present them in the application profile form. Non-use of an application profile causes local needs not to be considered in the metadata schema, and this causes the database, digital library, or information centers to face many problems during the use phase (Najafzadeh, 2016).
Application profiles consist of metadata elements from one or more standards that are implemented, combined, and optimized according to the local environment. Combining multiple standard metadata schemas to develop an application profile enables metadata to have a higher level of standardization, organization, and interoperability, and to be easily shared among many organizations (Nonthakarn & Wuwongse, 2015). Application profile consists of four main components: application, entities, entities’ properties, and property’s value (Gerontakos & Riesenberg, 2021, p14). From Taheri's point of view (2014, p154), the birth certificate of each metadata application profile element has 13 components. These components are: name of term, label, defined by, source definition, library definition, description, type of term, refinement(s), refined by, encoding scheme, obligation, data type, and occurrence. These components are generally mentioned in the table form.
Libraries, archives, and museums have been important institutions that have facilitated access to all kinds of information in the form of diverse content objects and have led to the cultural and educational progress of the society. These institutions in the current information society need to describe and organize their content objects, and metadata tools are very helpful in this field. Therefore, some of the best places to design, use, and exploit application profiles are libraries and information centers.
Methodology
The research method was practical in terms of the goal, which was carried out with an analysis approach. The research community was the employees of the organization department and managers of the Library, Museum and Archive of the Holy Shrine of Hazrat Masoumeh (A.S.) and elements, attributes and properties of the metadata standards of the cultural heritage context (library, archive and museum), which were selected by purposeful sampling method. The data collection method was structured observation and the tools were interviews, questionnaires, and checklists
Results
The findings showed that in order to describe and organize (process) the content objects of the Library, Museum, and Archive of the Holy Shrine of Hazrat Masoumeh (A.S.), three separate metadata application profiles are needed for the library, museum, and archive. The metadata application profile designed for library, museum and archives content objects had 53, 83, and 27 main and sub-elements, respectively. Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), UK Collection Management Standard (Spectrum), and International Standard Archival Description (ISAD) had the highest number in the metadata application profile in the contexts of library, museum, and archives, respectively.
Conclusion
The design of a metadata application profile will lead to the proper description and processing of content objects, more convergence of the cultural heritage context, as well as better management of metadata. This is done according to local context and needs, and it will increase the access points, retrieval, and interoperability with other information management systems and libraries
Keywords
)