Recent Developments in Cultural Heritage Image Databases: Directions for User-Centered Design

Library Trends, Fall, 1999 by Christie Stephenson

ABSTRACT

FROM 1995 THROUGH 1997, SEVEN CULTURAL HERITAGE repositories and seven universities collaborated on an extensive demonstration project called the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project (MESL) to explore the administrative, technical, and pedagogical issues involved in making digital museum images and information available to educational audiences. This article reviews the MESL project's methods and findings in a number of areas--descriptive metadata, database design, interface design, and tools for use. It discusses more recent development efforts in extending the model for digital image delivery of visual resources to higher education audiences. Finally, it suggests how to proceed by posing a number of user-centered questions about the design goals for networked access to the vast visual resources of the cultural heritage community. Selected projects from the literature of computer and information science are discussed to stimulate thinking about avenues for research and to focus project design goals.

INTRODUCTION

In his 1996 review article, "Image Databases: The First Decade, the Present, and the Future," Howard Besser (1997b) presented an overview of ten years in the development of image databases designed to provide access to cultural heritage information. How much further have image delivery systems progressed in the past several years of rapid technological change? This article examines the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project as well as several more recent projects representing the current state of development of cultural heritage image databases for academic use. It reviews recent literature in areas such as image indexing and retrieval, interface design, and tool development, and urges a reexamination of our efforts in those areas based on a more rigorous analysis of user needs.

THE MUSEUM EDUCATIONAL SITE LICENSING PROJECT (MESL)

In 1995, a boldly envisioned demonstration project was launched which provided new insights into the issues of building large-scale image databases for the delivery of cultural heritage information to higher education audiences. The Museum Educational Site Licensing Project was a collaborative project, involving seven universities and seven cultural heritage repositories, to investigate the administrative, legal, economic, technical, and educational issues involved in providing networked distribution of museum content for educational use. During the two years of the project, the seven museums provided nearly 10,000 digital images and accompanying descriptive metadata records. These were distributed to the seven universities, each of which developed their own local delivery system. Although much of the project focused on the legal and administrative issues of licensing, it also provided a valuable testbed for exploring a range of issues related to the building and subsequent use of large image databases from disparate collections of cultural heritage images and data. Although only limited rigorous research was undertaken within the brief duration of the project (1995-1997), the project participants were able to report a number of useful observations about descriptive metadata, database and system design, interface design, and tools for use of the images and information (Stephenson & McClung, 1998).

Descriptive Metadata

While traditional analog visual resource collections in educational institutions have depended on physical arrangement and local cataloging to provide access, the descriptive metadata provided with the MESL images was extracted from data that already existed in the museum collection management systems-legacy data from systems built primarily to handle the internal informational requirements of the repositories. The first step in the process of providing useful descriptive metadata to the universities was to agree on a common metadata structure to which the individual institutions could map their own data. The MESL Data Dictionary, defining records composed of thirty-two data fields, was developed to serve this purpose. The museums mapped their data to this structure and developed export routines to extract data from their collection management systems and populate the MESL data records. If they did not have data for a specific field, it was left blank. The completeness of the records varied both within a single institution as well as from institution to institution, depending on the level of documentation any object might have received.

The data populating the various fields in the records were not standardized in any way. Because museums have only recently begun to adopt principles such as authority control, there were many variations in data values for standard entries such as artist names. And very few of the museums had supplied any subject access beyond the most general terms; when present, they were inconsistently applied. The museum data had been created for collection management, not public access; making it available to a new user group, beyond the museum staff for which it was created, revealed its inconsistency and limited usefulness for open ended searching. One can postulate that what was true for the MESL museum data is generalizable to most museum collections' management information (Dowden, 1998).