Online event-based conservation documentation: A case study from the IIC website

There is a wealth of conservation-related resources that are published online on institutional and personal websites. There is value in searching across these websites, but this is currently impossible because the published data do not conform to any universal standard. This paper begins with a review of the types of classifications employed for conservation content in several conservation websites. It continues with an analysis of these classifications and it identifies some of their limitations that are related to the lack of conceptual basis of the classification terms used. The paper then draws parallels with similar problems in other professional fields and investigates the technologies used to resolve them. Solutions developed in the fields of computer science and knowledge organization are then described. The paper continues with the survey of two important resources in cultural heritage: the ICOM-CIDOC-CRM and the Getty vocabularies and it explains how these resources can be combined in the field of conservation documentation to assist the implementation of a common publication framework across different resources. A case study for the proposed implementation is then presented based on recent work on the IIC website. The paper concludes with a summary of the benefits of the recommended approach. An appendix with a selection of classification terms with reasonable coverage for conservation content is included

Creative Archiving: A Case Study from the John Latham Archive

This article looks at the history of the archive profession and emphasises the perceived role of the archivist as the keeper of truth. It focuses on the recent developments in archival practice with the adoption of post-modern thinking and its implementation with open-access archives online. Following a discussion of that approach, it introduces the concept of creative archiving as an alternative approach to archival practice and continues with the presentation of a case study from the John Latham Archive. It concludes with a discussion of the main pros and cons of creative archiving

The John Latham Archive: an on-line implementation using Drupal

This article is an account of the online presentation of the personal papers of the late British artist John Latham. The John Latham Archive online follows the proposal of creative archiving and has been implemented using the Drupal content management system. The author begins with a summary of the ideas of creative archiving and explains how these depend on recent innovations of online software. The article continues by highlighting the potential of Drupal as an archiving tool for creative archiving. An example implementation of the John Latham Archive online is described by relating the cosmological ideas of the artist with practical software tools which have been used to model them. The author concludes with some remarks on the capacity of the recommended software tools for creative archiving

The Development of the Language of Bindings Thesaurus

Bookbindings have long been the Cinderella of the bibliographical world, mostly ignored unless extensively decorated, and the reason most often given for this by cataloguers and bibliographers has been the absence of any consistent and recognized terminology with which to describe them, especially those bindings which have little or no decoration. There are many reasons why no such terminology had been created, but a lack of serious research, the confusion inherent in inherited and inconsistent terminologies, and a general lack of the expertise required to recognize different structures and materials were chief among them. This has not been helped by the antiquarian book trade, which has over the past century and a half developed its own highly idiosyncratic and inconsistent, if not actually inaccurate, terminologies. Traditional bookbinding terms in English, as they have come down to us, refer mostly to nineteenth- century binding practice, as the ϐirst bookbinding manual in English dates only from 1811, and the terms used are therefore not necessarily helpful in describing earlier bookbinding practices. The emergence after the disastrous ϐloods in Florence in 1966 of the distinct discipline now known as book conservation made the creation of such comprehensive and consistent terminology essential, as recording the distinctive features of bookbindings and their condition was a necessary part of book conservation. A small number of book conservators went on to do further research into historical book structures, extending and reϐining the newly created terminology and giving precise meanings to traditional terms that had often been used very loosely up to that date. Unfortunately, the new terms coined in this process by different researchers were not themselves always consistent, with the inevitable risk of creating further confusion rather than reducing it. As, however, more extensive use was made of databases to record such details, the need for consistency in the form of a standardized thesaurus became ever more pressing

Off-the-shelf CRM with Drupal: a case study of documenting decorated papers

We present a method of setting up a website using the Drupal CMS to publish CRM data. Our setup requires basic technical expertise by researchers who are then able to publish their records in both a human accessible way through HTML and a machine friendly format through RDFa. We begin by examining previous work on Drupal and the CRM and identifying useful patterns. We present the Drupal modules that are required by our setup and we explain why these are sustainable. We continue by giving guidelines for setting up Drupal to serve CRM data easily and we describe a specific installation for our case study which is related to decorated papers alongside our CRM mapping. We finish with highlighting the benefits of our method (i.e. speed and user-friendliness) and we refer to a number of issues which require further work (i.e. automatic validation, UI improvements and the provision for SPARQL endpoints)

Versioning materiality: Documenting evidence of past binding structures

Describing the structure and materials of bookbindings is an essential task of the study of the history of the book. Books with repaired or replaced binding structures are of particular interest given that often evidence of one or even two or more previous structures remain on the book. The results of rebinding can be considered as separate versions of the binding structure. Evidence of the binding structures need to be matched with the corresponding version of the binding. This helps formulating provenance. In this paper we discuss problems of documenting binding evidence including a) the reuse of earlier components in later bindings and b) the reuse of components originally belonging to other books. After a review of diferent approaches to the description of earlier bindings we focus on the CIDOCCRM as a possible way of modelling the versions of bindings through an event-centric approach and ofering a number of ebamples. iinally, we discuss the advantages of using the CRM for versioning as well as the limitations of our method

Issue 530: Bias in data structure

Presentation to the CIDOC-CRM Special Interest Group on the issues raised from the Worlding Public Cultures project and how to approach them

Beyond databases: Linked open data for bookbinding descriptions

Historical methodologies rely on evidence in order to support hypotheses. Bookbindings can play a key role in supporting hypotheses because they offer a plethora of physical evidence of materials and techniques. Publishing this evidence online may showcase a specific collection but it does not make the records re-usable by researchers without time-consuming work. In this paper I am looking into recent developments of the semantic web technologies which refer to re-usable data as “Linked Open Data” and examine how it is possible to employ these technologies in historical bookbinding research