A Lover's Eye: Miniature Art

Methodology

About the Metadata 

Object Images and it's correlating information were gathered from three museum site collections: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Cleveland Museum of Art.  

The metadata of each object is written with a set selection of Dublin Core elements that best catalogues the material chosen for the item set. Since each item in the collection is relatively similar to each other, I made the decision to keep each element set the same for each object, in the interest of consistency. I also decided to define each element specifically to it’s museum collection in order to provide some differentiation to the item. An example of an item and it’s subsequent metadata is attached at the bottom of the page.

Controlled Vocabulary Decisions:

Subject: Library of Congress: Subject Headings- to facilitate the uniform access and retrieval of items in a collection.

Spatial Coverage (Place): The Getty: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names - to consistently define a place of origin and provide access and retrieval  to end-users for geographic information.

Creator: The Getty: Union List of Artist Names - to link an authoritative database to the name of an obscure artist. Additionally, since many of the items have unknown creators, the ULAN can provide a least nationality to the lost name.

Dublin Core Element Decisions:

Identifier: The accession number provided by the specific museum’s collection.

Title: Title of the object provided by the specific museum collection.

Date: Date provided by the museum collection.

Description: I only included the physical description provided by the museum’s collection, because I did not want to conjecture and provide false details without better knowledge of the object. Description also includes the dimensions (when provided by the museum collection) to add to the sparseness of information.

Subject: Covers what this object is and the essence of the item. I used different Library of Congress Subject headings to best define what each object portrays.

Medium: The material used to make the object, provided by the museum’s collection.

Provenance: The previous owners of the object, provided by the museum’s collection.

Rights: the online accessibility of each object, provided by the museum’s collection.

Relation: Reference to a related resource, that being the particular museum each object belongs to.

Spatial Coverage: Where each object originated from, provided by the museum’s collection and defined by the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names.

Creator: Who was the artist of each object, provided by the museum’s collection and defined by the Getty Union List of Artist Names.