I’ve never been much for New Year’s resolutions – I tend to leave my existential crisis for my birthday in February.   I also wasn’t enrolled in any classes in the Fall 2008 semester, so I don’t have an end-of-semester report on my courses to offer you.   What I had been hoping to tell you was that the dissertation proposal was behind me and that I was moving onto the dissertation itself.   I’d always had some reservations whether Fall 2008 was a realistic target, and circumstances have proved those hunches were correct. Expect to see something in the Spring 2009 term.

I’ve  decided to take a step back from the collection ontology development that I talked about earlier.  While I still feel that this would be a do-able project, I’m not so sure it would have a broad impact as a solo project (thanks to some helpful advice from colleagues).  Instead, I’m hoping that my research can inform conversations about collections within existing forums and standards groups.

The funny thing about blogging your way to a dissertation is that the path ahead is not always obvious.  So probably you’ll see less direct discussion here about the proposal – until it’s done. I’m particularly keen on looking more closely at the kind of scholarly communication taking place in LIS, museum studies and digital humanities blogs finding a place for Inherent Vice in those conversations – rather than being something of a monologue of what I’m up to (twitter seems to do a better job at that anyway).

Although I can’t say that 2008 was a terrible year, I’m glad its behind me and am looking forward to moving ahead in 2009.

You see it all the time. It’s peppered throughout the RLG Silos of the LAMs report…all over the IMLS materials…on other digitization project websites….and I’m certainly using it all the time. But rarely do you see a definition to go along with it. In fact I’ve tried a few times in the past to try to pin down just what “cultural heritage” covers. It always seemed a little dangerous to use it without having a good definition to point to. Apparently I’m not the only person who’s been unsuccessful at trying to nail the cultural heritage jelly to the wall.

To me “cultural heritage” often feels like a euphemism for something else that we really want to say – like “LAMs”. “Libraries, archives and museums” gets boringly repetitive after you’ve used it a few times in your report or grant application. Besides,  in this age of supposed “convergence” a better collective noun to refer to these things might be “cultural heritage institutions.”

UNESCO Cultural Heritage

Whenever faced with a challenge like this, I often find it helpful to run to government bodies because they often are obligated to be specific about what they are talking about.  This is particularly true whenever international treaties and laws are involved – and even more so when money is involved. So one way to view a definition of “cultural heritage” is through its legal definitions. UNESCO has a description of cultural heritage on its website, although the page I’m linking to seems out of date. This page reminds us that “cultural heritage” is not easily defined because it’s been a moving target with an evolving set of definitions over time. The Getty Research Institute has a nice list of cultural heritage policy documents, many of which describe the legal definitions of “cultural heritage” at different points in history.

A more recent version (at least according to the timestamp in the footer) of the UNESCO Culture pages introduces a more recent trend towards dividing “cultural heritage’ into a few categories:

• Intangible Heritage includes folk customs, folklore and orally transmitted traditions that may not have a physical instantiation.
• Movable Heritage and museums includes the kinds of things we normally think about as part of “collections” – archaeological artifacts, paintings, architectural elements,decorative arts, etc., etc.
• World Heritage appears to be things that are not “movable” such as monumental architecture and sites which are bound to their location.

“Cultural Heritage” in the U.S.

Closer to home, I first stopped in at IMLS to see whether they have any definitions. True to their mandate they don’t define cultural heritage institutions, but instead talk in terms of libraries and museums as “stewards of cultural heritage.” The Museum Services Act goes on to specify cultural, historical, natural and scientific heritage is what museums are responsible for. (the libraries have focused on more abstract definitions of services and the outcomes that they hope will come from funding them).

Rachel Frick at IMLS pointed me towards the definition used by North Carolina Exploring Cultural Heritage Online (NC-ECHO):

Any cultural institution (library, archive, museum, historic site, or organization), which maintains a permanent, non-living collection of unique materials held for research and/or exhibit purposes and open for the use of the public will be surveyed. Denominational/associational collections will be surveyed, but individual church collections will not. Art museums will be surveyed but galleries will not. Zoos, arboreta, and parks will not be surveyed, unless as a part of their mission, they hold collections described above.

The Canadians are also generally very good at this, especial in the heritage sector.  From the Canadian Heritage Information Network, I ended up at the legislation empowering the Department of Canadian Culture. This unfortunately wasn’t much help, since its covers a very broad swath of “cultural” things – from battlefields to performing arts to libraries, archives and museums.

“Cultural Heritage” and Ontology Development

So what? The definition of “cultural heritage” is squishy. Squishy is good right? That may be true, but at this stage in preparing my dissertation proposal I need to nail some of these things down. I think this is particularly important if my overall goal is to develop a domain ontology for “cultural heritage” collections.  I’ll be asking for trouble if I do so without first clearly identifying what my “domain” is.  Identifying the domain will also inform me about what kinds of data sources I will use for developing a new framework.

The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) also starts out by defining its intended scope by stating:

The term cultural heritage collections is intended to cover all types of material collected and displayed by museums and related institutions, as defined by ICOM. This includes collections, sites and monuments relating to natural history, ethnography, archaeology, historic monuments, as well as collections of fine and applied arts. The exchange of relevant information with libraries and archives, and the harmonisation of the CIDOC CRM with their models, fall within the CIDOC CRM’s intended scope.

This is of course a good start if you are just talking about museums – what I hope to accomplish here is more of what appears in the last lines of this statement – harmonization among different institutions who are “stewards of cultural heritage.” This seems like an approach that might better achieve “convergence” instead of trying to simply map between the library domain, the archives domain, and the museum domain.

In the end, the lack of any explicit common definitions makes me believe that I’ll need to specify one of my own that provides clear boundaries of what is in and what is out of scope for this project.

In “My So-Called Second Life” I talked about my decision to NOT focus on Second Life for my dissertation. This of course left the question of just what I am doing for my dissertation unanswered.

The other thing that happened last fall was that I started working on a new component of the IMLS Digital Collections and Content Project. This gave me an opportunity to get back to some of the problems that had brought me to graduate school in the first place – looking at metadata for cultural heritage collections. The Collection/Item Metadata Relationships (CIMR) research group has been working to develop formal specifications of the kinds of relationships that hold between the description of a collection and the items that are members of that collection. (working on getting those various papers into our IR, happy open access day!). What we hope to accomplish by the end of the project is an expression of these relationships using some knowledge representation languages like OWL and RDFs – hopefully making these kinds of relationships available for computer processing.

It has been nice to get back to the familiar problems. They’re the kinds of problems that I’d started working on back in Colorado; that led me here and drew me towards the ontology classes I took through my Masters and PhD coursework. They also follows on some of the early pilot research I did for the IMLS DCC. So I’ve also decided to build my dissertation on this solid foundation of experience and learning, pleasantly surrounded by a supportive group of people working on related issues.

As we’ve worked on CIMR research it has been fairly surprising how little work has been done on characterizing just what “collections” are. It’s one of those terms that we use all the time that usually carries different meanings when used in different contexts. We’ve largely been avoiding it in our work as a problem that’s “too interesting” and beyond the scope of the project. We’ve been focusing our attention on the Dublin Core Collection Application Profile and it’s characterization of collections being something that items are simply “gathered into.”

However DC-CAP is largely based on the pre-existing item-level description format of Dublin Core (I’d say the same about how CDWALite and VRACore handle “collections” as well.) Archivists will point towards Encoded Archival Description, but of course this is premised on the archival community’s understanding of what shape collections take. Experiments here with EAD also demonstrate that it doesn’t decompose nicely when flattened. (I think the expression of whole-part relationships in EAD is weak when aggregating across EAD documents – makes perfect sense when you’re trying to wrangle the paper in at first, but whew headaches later). And there are lots of unstructured representations of museum collections on websites and in catalogues. These are a good start towards describing collections -as collections – but they also leave me unsatisfied that they’ve given us to the tools to fully describe collections in useful ways in online aggregated environments.

Perhaps aligning the ways that we describe collections wasn’t quite so important in the past. But since the digitization of Library, archive, museum (LAM) collections has supposedly broken down the barriers for re-integrating these resources it seems like a good time to revisit the issue. Most of the efforts so far have been around finding common ways of expressing and sharing item-level metadata irrespective of the characteristics of the collection as a whole. Perhaps we’ve lost something important by only providing the item out of its context. Maybe more robust ways of sharing that context can help make those items more useful and meaningful to end users (and as Hur-Li Lee suggests, maybe we need to incorporate some of their needs in the model). Maybe it can also tell us how we can better transform the metadata about those items when it is re-situated in a new context. Maybe providing this context means that a user might be able to navigate among items that already have important relationships with each other. The preservation of context is already a problem that is receiving increased attention in Semantic Web circles, perhaps a better understanding of our collections can help us take advantage of these new platforms.

I’ve decided that the best way to address some of these questions is by adopting some of the approaches we’re using in CIMR. I will be proposing to develop an collections ontology drawn from across the cultural heritage community. The rest of the fall will be a process of specifying exactly what this means in practical terms (well, practical in an academic sense) – the scope of the research, datasets, methodologies, etc.

Wish me luck as I’m off and running. (yeah, more running less crawling…)