20th Century Artists - In their Own Words

20th Century Artists In Their Own Words

I chose this material because I wanted to work with a/v material so I could become more familiar metadata associated with moving image material, particularly PBCore. The subject matter of 20th Century artist's voices originated from a book I'm reading called 9th Street Women. In my career, I worked with artist-endowed foundations that represent artists active in the post-war era. I expanded out the time period from the post-war New York School to include artists I was interested whose active periods span the 20th century.

My home page gives an overview of the collection content:

20th Century Artists - In Their Own Words is a collection of film and video that documents the work and lives of artists. The artists's voice is present in all the selected material.  In art criticism, with its focus on the trajectory of art historical movements, the artist as a unique and individual voice should not be lost. In this film and video collection, the artists' self-presentation may be contextualized within a traditional documentary format or may  take the form of non-linear, experimental film-making. Sources for the material are as varied as YouTube, Vimeo, UBU Web, artists' estate websites and museum websites.

Notes on metadata :

I chose twelve field that I felt fully represented the resource while keeping a clean and minimal record. I used Dublin core as the basis for my element sets since it is a simple and widely used schema. The only fields from Dublin Core I did not include were Language, Publisher and Relation. I determined that these fields were not applicable to my collection or were redundant or unnecessary. The only fields that I needed to add from PBCore, were Duration and Genre.

Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter is an example of my metadata schema. In particular, this record highlights the advantages of using of Coverage. I was able to index the record with two locales in which the artist worked. I appreciated the difference of Coverage from Subject in that the resource is not about New York, NY or Vétheuil, France but that interviews and events in the documentary occurred there.

I used the content standard recommended by PBCore for duration which is the ISO 8601 standard: 00:00:00. I reformatted all the durations to comply with this standard.

For genre, PBCore recommended a few options for controlled vocabulary including PBCore Genre (which is possibly defunct since the link to it on their website was broken) and LOC Genres. I found that LOC Genres worked for my purposes and allowed me to represent subtle distinctions in my material such as documentary films, experimental films and Interviews.

My identifiers start with a prefix of two letters referencing the source of the material followed by a two digit number that feres to the order it was added to the collection

My Subject field uses the Library of Congress Subject Headings for a controlled vocabulary. I used GeoNames for Coverage.

The metadata from my sources was fairly straightforward and directly mapped to those on my site. I did do some reformatting as I previously explained. All subject headings, genre and tags were added by me. None of the sources had data in those areas. I did not get all metadata from the same source as the link to the  resource. I had to refer to several sources to extract the metadata I needed and to pull the descrption that I felt best represented the resource.

I catalogued my records as Works as opposed to images. The other option with A/V material was to catalogue as instantiation. I did not do instantiation because this collection is not cataloguing physical objects, but is meant to inform the user of the existence of material on the chosen topic.