NCD Recommendation for the National Standard for ...

NCD Recommendation for the National Standard for Describing Digitized Heritage in Serbia Zoran Ognjanovi´c, Tamara Butigan-Vuˇcaj, Bojan Marinkovi´c1

Abstract In this paper we present a proposal for the national standard for describing digitized assets of movable heritage in Serbia. The proposal was made by the National center for digitization and supported by the Committee for digitization of the UNESCO commission of Serbia. The main objective of the proposal is to guarantee interoperability among resources available by different providers and compatibility with the most popular existing international standards.

1 Introduction The document [12] ”Recommendations for coordination of digitization of cultural heritage in South-Eastern Europe” accepted at the South-Eastern Europe regional meeting on digitization of cultural heritage (Ohrid, Macedonia, 17-20 March 2005) says that the current digitization practice in SEE is still not matching the priorities communicated on the EU-level and that the rich cultural content of the region is still underrepresented in the electronic space. One of the main principles accepted by the participants of the Meeting says that ”It is recognized that knowledge of the cultural and scientific heritage is essential for taking decisions concerning its digitization and for interpreting the digitized resources. For this reason, inventorying and cataloging should precede or accompany the digitization of cultural and scientific assets.” Zoran Ognjanovi´c Mathematical Institute, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Kneza Mihaila 35, Belgrade, Serbia, e-mail: [email protected] Tamara Butigan-Vuˇcaj Digital Library Department, National Library of Serbia, Skerli´ceva 1, Belgrade, Serbia e-mail: [email protected] Bojan Marinkovi´c Mathematical Institute, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Kneza Mihaila 35, Belgrade, Serbia, e-mail: [email protected]

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Zoran Ognjanovi´c, Tamara Butigan-Vuˇcaj, Bojan Marinkovi´c

Concerning the Meeting conclusions Serbian National Center for Digitization (NCD) recognized the metadata problem as the most sophisticated one in the cataloging phase of digitization. There are a lot of metadata schemes for describing digitized assets of heritage, but not the universal one. Serbian national heritage is described after different standards, according to the nature of assets, but once being digitized, national heritage needs one metadata standard before including in the national database of digital objects. The standard should guarantee interoperability among resources available by different providers and compatibility with the most popular existing international standards. Thus, the proposal contains two parts: • description of metadata related to individual assets of movable heritage1 and • mappings from/to some internationally recognized and/or widely used standards. This proposal is carried out by the Mathematical Institute of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the National Library of Serbia, but also supported by the National Museum (Belgrade), and the Historical Archive of Belgrade. These institutions together with Faculty of Mathematics (Belgrade), Archaeological Institute Belgrade, Archive of Republic Serbia, Serbian Institute for Monument Protection and Yugoslav Film Archive are founding members of the NCD [8]. Main goals of the NCD are to establish coordination of activities of local research and cultural institutions in the digitization field and to promote a national strategy for the cultural and scientific heritage digitization. The proposal is also accepted by the Committee for digitization of the UNESCO commission of Serbia.

2 Why national standard? Why national standard? To answer this question, we give a short overview of the current state-of-the-art in Serbia and the related international standards.

2.1 State-of-the-art in Serbia At the moment, there is no wide spread metadata standard for describing digitized heritage in Serbia. Actually, although the digitization process is entering most of the institution caring about national heritage, there is no metadata standard formally accepted at the state level, and we face this metadata problem, let us call it in that way. Different providers of heritage resources (libraries, museums, archives, some research institutions) use international standards appropriate for their specific fields,

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The term movable heritage covers: library, archive and museum objects, furniture, scientific papers, machinery, religious object, photos, natural items, etc.

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or ad-hock methods, or old procedures for describing cultural assets in classical format (formulated in 1980s or early 1990s). In fact, some providers wait for some solution of the metadata problem and do not do anything related to digital cataloging. It means that our digital catalogs, if exist at all, cannot help in communication between different kinds of providers and users.

2.2 International standards There are plenty of metadata standards for describing heritage resources, for example: • • • • •

Dublin Core [4], EAD [5], MARC [7], TEL AP [11], FRBR [2, 6] etc.

Dublin Core is developed and maintained by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI). The goal of DCMI is to promote interoperable metadata standards and develop specialized metadata vocabularies for describing resources. Although this standard can be applied to every kind of resources ensuring interoperability, as it is noted in [3], the problem is that the DC Element Set (Simple DC) is rather restricted and different information must be grouped into one element. More recently, DCMI has allowed some refinements of Simple DC - so called Qualified DC, so that it is possible to develop DC Application Profiles for specific applications and domains. It is important to emphasize that it is possible to lose some information in the process of reducing Qualified DC to Simple DC values. It might be noted that we could use Qualified DC to describe our approach. From our point of view, in this moment more important issue is to define what data should be included in the metadata standard, which is the subject of this paper, than to chose how to express them in one or the other format. However, one of the first steps we plan to carry out will be to develop the corresponding Qualified DC description. The other above mentioned standards are mainly related to some special subdomains of heritage. Encoded Archival Description (EAD) is focused on the archival resources with the goal to allow describing them and to make them accessible to users. Similarly, the MARC standards are used mostly for the representation and communication of bibliographic and related information in machine-readable form. Another librarian-supported standard is The European Library Application Profile (TEL AP). TEL AP for objects is based on the proposal of Dublin Core Metadata Initiative - Libraries Working Group for the Library Application Profile from 2002. TEL Metadata Working Group is responsible for additions and changes made on the basic document for TEL purposes, the functionality of the Portal at the first place. National Library of Serbia became the full partner of The European Library

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Zoran Ognjanovi´c, Tamara Butigan-Vuˇcaj, Bojan Marinkovi´c

in 2005 and getting known with the TEL AP concept was a kind of inspiration for the NCD metadata model. The TEL Metadata Registry of terms is currently in development, as well as TEL AP for objects, TEL AP for collections and future TEL AP for services. Functional requirements for bibliographic records (FRBR) is a conceptual, object-oriented model for metadata records, born also in the library world. The model is based on three groups of entities. The first one presents the products of intellectual or artistic endeavor being described, by four entities: work, expression, manifestation and item. Two entities: person and corporate body are in the second group, connected to the responsibility for the intellectual or artistic content, the production and distribution, or the custodianship of these products. The third group is covering subject area for intellectual or artistic endeavor with four entities: concept, object, event and place. FRBR is extendable to archives, museums and publishing area. Up to our knowledge, in the field of museums, there is no widely accepted metadata standards. We are aware of a set of recommendations called Spectrum, the UK Museum Documentation Standard [10]. Thus, from our point of view, although these standards are very important and useful in the corresponding subdomains of digitized heritage, they are partially incompatible, and cannot be directly used to cover the whole domain of heritage. Having all that in mind, the NCD decided, according to its coordinating role in the digitization field in Serbia, to take care and obligatory to try to solve this metadata problem and define a unique metadata core to assure the interoperability between various digital resources of national cultural and scientific heritage.

3 Methodology At the beginning of the project some requirements were determined to accommodate more-or-less divergent descriptive practices and to articulate needs of different specific heritage contexts. More precisely, the requirements were: • the definition should be rich enough so that it could be used to describe assets from libraries, museums, and archives, as well as from the other providers (research institutions, for example), • the definition should be flexible enough to allow translation to and from international standards, • the definition should allow: multilingual description of cultural and scientific assets and use of some pre-defined dictionaries for the particular elements as much as possible. The underlying idea, as it is mentioned in Introduction, is that the description of cultural assets based on this metadata set should be used to make decisions about future digitization. For this reason, the proposal contains more structured and detailed elements than it is usually the case.

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Fig. 1 The intended architecture of the metadata description system

4 Description of the standard According to the previous requirements, the following five basic objects were distinguished: • Person, and Group-of-persons for entities that have intellectual or some other important contribution to the creation of assets, that are subjects of and/or owners of cultural heritage assets, • Digital-document, for an individual file containing digital representation of the corresponding asset, • Digitized-asset, for the digitized asset of heritage, and • Controlled-term, for elements of a pre-defined dictionary. Figure 1 contains a structure based on the above mentioned set of meta-data objects, where the nodes represent the objects, and the arcs represent relationships between them. This structure forms a unique core representing an intersection of descriptions of assets from libraries, museums, and archives. However, our proposal allows some extensions related to the particular fields of interests. The object Controlled-term corresponds to standardized data values that can be used to improve access to information about heritage. Those values should be organized in a structured controlled vocabulary which offers preferred terms and synonyms, as for example in [1]. The sets of meta-data that corresponds to each of these objects were defined. They contain a descriptive and an administrative part. The administrative part identifies authors and/or owners of descriptions, assets of heritage and their digital representations. Note that, if appropriate, a description of access rights is also available to limit access to (parts of) resources. The following provides an abbreviated version of the descriptions of the mentioned objects (the full description in Serbian is available [9]).

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Zoran Ognjanovi´c, Tamara Butigan-Vuˇcaj, Bojan Marinkovi´c

5 Translations to international standards As a particular part, the proposal defines mappings to and from some international standards for meta-data (Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, The European Library Application Profile, Table of Core Metadata Elements for Library of Congress Digital Repository Development, Encoded Archival Description). An example of the translation of the elements of the objects Digital-document and Digitized-asset is given in Table 1. As it can be seen, some different elements of our objects must be grouped into one element and for some elements there are no corresponding translations in some of the mentioned standards.

NCD Description

DC

ISAD

EAD

description 3.3.1 scopecontent

TEL AP description

Type

type

3.1.5

genreform

Material Rights

medium rights

3.1.5 3.4.2

physdesc format.medium userestrict rigths

Access rights

accessRights 3.4.1 accessrestrict

Note Capture device(s)

3.6.1

MIME format(s)

Format

type

rights

note, odd daodesc daodesc

format

Library of Congress description summary original content type access rights access category capture device ID internet media type

Table 1 Mappings to/from international standards

6 Conclusion In this paper we present a proposal for a metadata description of individual assets of movable heritage. The main objective of the proposal is to guarantee: • interoperability among resources available by different providers, and • compatibility with the most popular existing international standards. The proposal is made and will be maintained and further developed by the most of the leading Serbian institutions in the field of digitization gathered in the Serbian National Center for Digitization. It will be submitted to the Serbian Ministry of culture to officially accept it as the metadata format for the future central national catalog of individual assets of (digitized) movable heritage. The expected official

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support will be especially important concerning the issue of creating an appropriate thesaurus. An object-oriented approach is used in defining the proposed metadata description. As technical benefits of such an approach, we would like to mention: • modularity, which makes it much easier to change individual components of the description • reusability of objects, which makes it possible that the same object can be used many times in the system (for example, a person could be in the same time an author of more than one asset, a member of some group of authors, owner of some files, etc.) The proposed metadata model is FRBR-ized in the domain of the second FRBR group of entities with person and group of persons with all the basic FRBR attributes for these entities. The future creation of a database of Serbian digitized heritage based on the NCD metadata standard will be the opportunity to implement some more aspects of the FRBR-model, like providing the easier access to users for particular segments of digital collections. Since the proposed set of metadata is related to individual objects of movable heritage, the plan of the NCD is to define similar sets of metadata related to: • non movable heritage and • heritage collections. Finally, we believe that developing the national metadata standard has a broader mission than the description itself. It is the potential influence on the subjects dealing with all kinds of national heritage preservation to think further in the direction of building the future heritage digital replica overcoming the differences and rivalry at national and international level, with the long-term goal to improve presence of Serbian heritage on the Internet.

Appendix Example 1. In this example we illustrate how to describe a book of a well-known Serbian comediograph Branislav Nuˇsi´c. The book, Autobiography, belongs to the collection of the Serbian Children’s digital library [13]. The illustrator of the edition, ˇ published by Kreativni centar, is Dobrosav Zivkovi´ c, and the editors are Simeon Marinkovi´c and Slavica Markovi´c. Digitization of the book was performed by Nikola Pavlovi´c from National library of Serbia. The author of the metadata records is Tamara Butigan. Table 2 contains a record which corresponds to the author. Table 3 contains a record which corresponds to the digital version of the book. Table 4 contains a record which corresponds to the ”hardcopy” version of the book.

8 Descriptive Name * First name * Family name Name version * First name * Family name Date of birth Date of death Sex Biography * Biography in Serbian * Biography in other languages Administrative Record Creation Date Record Creator Record Owner

Zoran Ognjanovi´c, Tamara Butigan-Vuˇcaj, Bojan Marinkovi´c

Branislav Nuˇsi´c Ben Akiba 1864 1938 male http://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Branislav Nuxi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branislav Nusic 30/3/2007 T. Butigan NBS

Table 2 PERSON – author Descriptive Title * Title in Serbian * Title in English Creator * Identifier * Role Location of digital document Administrative Archive date Digital document format Size Digital document MIME format Capture device Rights Access rights Digital object owner Record creation date Record creator Record owner Table 3 Digital document

Digitalizovana deˇcja knjiga Autobiografija, Branislava Nuˇsi´ca Digitized children’s book: Autobiography written by Branislav Nusic ID (Nikola Pavlovi´c) programmer http://www.digital.nbs.bg.ac.yu/decije/jpg/nusauto/ 2004 jpg 17.9MB image Epson GT 15000 NBS gained rights from the publishing house Unlimited NBS 30/3/2007 T. Butigan NBS

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Descriptive Title * Original name * Name in Serbian * Name in English Creator * Identifier * Role Contributor * Identifier * Role Contributor * Identifier * Role Contributor * Identifier * Role Classification * Classification scheme * Classification identifier Description * Description in Serbian

* Description in English

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Autobiografija Autobiografija Autobiography ID (Branislav Nuˇsi´c) writer ˇ ID (Dobrosav Zivkovi´ c) illustrator ID (Simeon Marinkovi´c) editor ID (Slavica Markovi´c) editor UDK 821.163.41-93 Autobiografija poznatog srpskog pisca Branislava Nuˇsi´ca ispriˇcana u formi sˇaljivog romana. Sadrˇzi i kra´ca objaˇsnjenja manje poznatih reˇci Autobiography of famous Serbian writer Branisav Nusic but written as a funny story. Vocabulary sections included.

Date and provenance * Date of origin 2001 * Provenance of origin Belgrade * Version of the cultural monument First issue Dimension * Dimension name Number of pages * Dimension value 283 Dimension * Dimension name Book back height * Dimension value 24 cm Type text Acquisition * Type of acquisition Legal deposit * Date of acquisition 06/2001

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Zoran Ognjanovi´c, Tamara Butigan-Vuˇcaj, Bojan Marinkovi´c

Owner NBS Source object ID II449580 Administrative Rights Publishing house Kreativni centar Access rights Unlimited Record creation date 30/01/2007 Record creator T. Butigan Record owner NBS Extensions for standard edition Publisher Kreativni centar Language scc Edition Collection Pustolovine Identifier ISBN 86-7781-042-0 Table 4: Digitalized asset

References 1. The Art & Architecture Thesaurus, AAT, http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting research/vocabularies/aat/. 2. A weblog about FRBR: Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, www.frbr.org, 2007. 3. I. Buonazia, M. E. Masci, D. Merlitti, The Project of the Italian Culture Portal and its Development. A Case Study: Designing a Dublin Core Application Profile for Interoperability and Open Distribution of Cultural Contents, ELPUB2007. Openness in Digital Publishing: Awareness, Discovery and Access - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Electronic Publishing held in Vienna, Austria 13-15 June 2007, Edited by: Leslie Chan and Bob Martens. 393–494, 2007. 4. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, http://dublincore.org/. 5. Encoded Archival Description, http://www.loc.gov/ead/. 6. IFLA Study Group, Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, www.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr.pdf, 1998. 7. MARC Standards, http://www.loc.gov/marc/. 8. National Center for Digitization, http://www.ncd.matf.bg.ac.yu. 9. Recommendation for the National Standard for Describing Digitized Heritage in Serbia, 2007. http://www.ncd.matf.bg.ac.yu/?page=news&lang=sr&file=predlogStandardaMetadata.htm 10. SPECTRUM, the UK Museum Documentation Standard, http://www.mda.org.uk/spectrum.htm. 11. The European Library, http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/ 12. Recommendations for coordination of digitization of cultural heritage in South-Eastern Europe, Conclusions of the Regional Meeting on Digitization of Cultural Heritage, Ohrid, Macedonia, 17-20 March 2005, Review of the National Center for Digitization, 2 -7, 2005. (http://elib.mi.sanu.ac.yu/files/journals/ncd/7/ncd07002.pdf) 13. Serbian Children’s digital library, http://digital.nbs.bg.ac.yu/decije/