CLD Online Tutorial

Section 7:

FAQs

What is a collection?

Does it matter if individual items in my collection are uncatalogued?

Which of the RSLP fields are mandatory?

We are planning to design our own template/element set for collection description. Is this appropriate?

What is the locator field?

What if my collection does not have an online location - but a physical location

What if I want to include the URL for the home page of the library or archive where the physical collection is housed?

What is the difference between the elements "Access Control" and "Access Conditions"?

How can a Collection-Level Description address the requirements of different audiences/users?

But everyone knows what we have

What is the difference between Times (dcq:temporal), Contents Date Range (cld:contentsDateRange) and Accumulation Date Range (cld:accumulationDateRange)?

Q. What is a collection

A. A collection might be:

• A set of physical items e.g. books, papers, manuscripts, objects
• A set of digital items e.g. a set of HTML documents, a set of digital images
• A set of records describing digital or physical items e.g. a catalogue:
• the catalogue can be physical e.g. a card catalogue or an archival handlist which exists in paper form
• the catalogue can also be digital e.g. an online library catalogue, a desktop database containing records describing a manuscript collection, an HTML page pointing to a set of digital images

Q. Does it matter if individual items in my collection are uncatalogued?

A. No, collection descriptions are particularly useful finding aids to collections of materials where individual items are not listed. Compared with the labour intensive and expensive process of making detailed item level records, the creation of a CLD is an extremely quick, efficient and cost-effective way of making your resources known to a wider audience?

Q. Which of the RSLP fields are mandatory?

A. There is no minimum level record defined for the RSLP CD schema, however each project/service should consider the level that is relevant to their specific service.

Q. We are planning to design our own template/element set for collection description. Is this appropriate?

A. Decisions about the elements required by individual projects to describe their collections will no doubt be shaped by factors which are specific to their own operating context, or to a particular community or domain. It would be quite unreasonable to expect that every collection description project deployed exactly the same element set and structured their databases in exactly the same way.

However, it is often the case that such collection descriptions form part of a shared resource: even if this is not through an automated process of aggregating records or cross-searching distributed datasets, users will visit individual websites and expect to be able to compare the descriptions of collections from different sources. One of the objectives of encouraging some commonality of approach to resource description is to ensure that the user has some common experience when viewing the results, and a sense of being able to "compare like with like". With this in mind, it is recommended that the schemas/element sets used internally by projects should be "mapped" to more widely deployed/standard schema.

Where a more widely deployed schema or standard does closely meet the requirements of a project's collection description requirements, perhaps with the addition of a number of local "extension" elements to support local requirements or the removal of some optional elements from the standard schema, it is recommended that the project adopts the standard schema directly as the basis of local templates. With this approach, any "mapping" task becomes mainly one of filtering out the local extensions.

Q. What is the locator field?

A. This is the online location (URL) of an online (digital) collection.

Q. What if my collection does not have an online location - but a physical location

A. If your description is a set of physical items then that collection cannot have an online location, so the locator property is not appropriate in this instance

Q. What if I want to include the URL for the home page of the library or archive where the physical collection is housed?

A. You could use the attribute cld:seeAlso for the URL of the home page of the library or archive where you're physical collection is situated

Q. What is the difference between the elements "Access Control" and "Access Conditions"?

A. "Access Control" is a property of the "Collection" and describes access restrictions placed on the collection
" Access Conditions" is a property of the "Location" and describes the conditions of access to the location e.g. opening hours etc

Q. How can a Collection-Level Description address the requirements of different audiences/users?

A. Different audiences may require a different style or emphasis of descriptive content - therefore the same text content of the CLD will not meet the requirements of, for example an academic researcher and a tourist.
In this context a collection owner may choose to provide multiple CLD records for the same collection, with descriptive content tailored for different audiences

Q. But everyone knows what we have

A. Many resources are well known in the scholarly community, to specialists in particular fields and to those who know where to look for references. However, there are many independent researchers, unattached to an academic institution or without easy recourse to a research library, and many more people with legitimate interest who do not know how to go about discovering the whereabouts of resources.

Q. What is the difference between Times (dcq:temporal), Contents Date Range (cld:contentsDateRange) and Accumulation Date Range (cld:accumulationDateRange)?

A. Time (dcq:coverage) is the "temporal coverage" of the items in the collection. "Coverage" is used in the sense it is used in the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, "The extent or scope of the content of the resource". So in RSLP CD, you might think of it like a "time-period-as-subject" of the collection.

Contents date range (cld:contentsDateRange) is the range of creation dates of the items in the collection.

Accumulation date range (cld:accumulationDateRange) is the range of dates over which the items were brought together as a collection.

Consider a collection of items about the First World War, created during the 1950s, and brought together into a collection in the 1970s. A description of that collection would include:

dcq:coverage 1914/1918
cld:contentsDateRange 1950/1959
cld:accumulationDateRange 1970/1979