Standards in The Visual and Linguistic Language of An Online Historic Costume Collection

Abstract

In a quest to increase access to and conserve their collections many institutions are creating websites that do more than advertise the physical collection but provide images and data for selected pieces from their collection. Libraries and archives, some with digital images, are implementing the standards for metadata harvesting and image capture created to facilitate the use of the internet, beyond its use as a tool for resource discovery, to a tool for “distributed custodianship” of resources. Small museums and collections may have trouble justifying the expending of the resources to implement these standards. This paper describes an evolutionary prototype for an archiving project for Historic Costume that is developing a process to incorporate these standards into an online searchable database for the Collection, http://digimuse.cis.drexel.edu. The evolution of the prototype includes the retrospective conversion of collection data from 3“x5” paper file card to a relational database that includes images. All aspects of standardized data structure from naming conventions, data structure, and image capture have been considered.