Smithsonian Collections Blog: DPLA and the Smithsonian Participation

abernard102@gmail.com 2016-04-15

Summary:

"DPLA Fest 2016 is happening this week. We are so excited to see the tremendous success of this great national project! Attending this event in Washington DC hosted by the National Archives, the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian triggered my memory of an interesting beginning ... My fellow team members from the Collections Systems & Digital Assets Division worked together to create a dedicated system which contained the existing Smithsonian data, and we planned on ingesting data from the Library of Congress and the National Archives into it. This is one of the presentation slides where we proposed the system architecture ... As part of this demonstration, we wanted to highlight the fact that records from different organizations could work well together. Both the Library of Congress and the National Archives sent records that they could produce in a short amount of time. Among them were catalog records of photographs, personal letters, and music manuscripts. These items told stories of Civil War veterans, the Union Pacific Railroad, musical history, and gave insight into the lives of many famous people from American history. Because the National Archives had a proprietary system, it was not easy for them to produce records in MARC format (Machine Readable Cataloging format). It took some hand coding to produce these archival records in MARC. Though the Smithsonian system did not require records to be stored in this format, using MARC enabled us to standardize our starting point. This also made the point that even though our data could come from different places, we needed a standard format to create the necessary data consistency for a common system to work well ..."

Link:

http://si-siris.blogspot.com/2016/04/dpla-and-smithsonian-participation.html

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.smithsonian oa.national_archives oa.loc oa.dpla oa.metadata oa.interoperability oa.events oa.presentations

Date tagged:

04/15/2016, 18:56

Date published:

04/15/2016, 14:56