• Agenda: Continuation of the discussion on the Contini-Volterra Photographic Archive
• Members present: Nancy Boggess-Korekach, Marshall Breeding, Zora Breeding, Eileen Crawford, Teresa Gray, Mary Charles Lasater, Pete Wilson, Linda Tesar, Roberta Winjum. Absent: Annette Williams. Guests: Juanita Murray, Karin Sack.
Contini-Volterra Photographic Archive discussion centered around the metadata fields selected for the project and the implications for the functionality of the database search engine that Marshall will construct. He has used DB TextWorks, but is looking to replace it (for this archive as well as earlier projects) possibly with the open source MySQL. A concern is to insure that any database created locally will have the capability in the future to be dumped into a wide variety of applications and mapable to Dublin, VRA, Primo, etc. Individual metadata fields constituted the bulk of the groups’ discussion. For example:
Artist: Artist’s name and see also references are constructed for the first occurrence. A save as feature allows multiple occurrences of an artist to be duplicated. This works for a small database like the Contini-Volterra, but a separate authority database was also discussed. In either case, the searcher should have the option of typing in the artist or selecting from a list of names.
Dates: Three fields for dates were identified. Two that the public views: date of the art object (ex. 1700) and date of the photograph (1935); one that the database uses to sort: 1699:01:16.
Subjects: There is one subject field in the metadata form provided by Karin. The committee recommended breaking it into two fields – one to designate genre and the other topical keywords.
Collection: Refers to the repository/current location of the art object depicted in the photograph. Staff notes is a space designated for notes about an object, such as former attributions that may enable a scholar to find a particular work.
• Next meeting October 16, 2006
* Minutes submitted by ekc