Introduction
Valerie Addonizio Prompt
for recruitmentIntroducing the 2021-2022 Metadata Standards sub-team and Metadata Standards in general.
Join us! Make a difference in Aspace today! Look out for a call for nominations on the AS listserv, blog, and Google Group in April. Non-Aspace Members are welcome on the Technical Advisory Council (TAC).
For any questions, please email this year’s Nominating Committee Chair Nick Zmijewski (zmijewski[at]industrialarchives[dotorg]) or ArchivesSpaceHome[at]lyrasis[dotorg].
Tiers of Support
As we began to share the draft Tiers of Support, we got general approval of the need to be clear about AS's relationships with metadata standards. We also received pointed feedback along two tracks.
First, it became clear that we were conflating “supporting a standard” in that one can follow a data model in AS and “exporting compliant records” as in one can serialize data from AS into a valid record within a particular namespace. Second, our choice of standards was flagged as being very US-centric, due mostly to its reactive stance. If the goal is to make ASpace useful to the community outside the U.S.—and we believe that it is -- we need to adopt a proactive stance. Offering support to additional standards may encourage wider adoption of ASpace outside the U.S., subsequently resulting in greater engagement with the tool by that community.
It is worth underscoring that not only can no system support all standards all the time, but the human time and attention available to work on standards is finite. Some sort of prioritization is inevitable, and we're ultimately seeking to make those choices transparent. With that background, we have a series of discussion questions we would like to pose.
Why you use the standards that you are using? For compliance reasons or data exchange reasons?
What does it mean for AS to be standards-compliant? That its data model support every standard, or that it can import/export (through mappings) every standard?
What should be the balance of a support between “supporting a standard” in that you can follow a data model in AS and “exporting compliant records” as in you can serialize data from AS into a valid record within a particular namespace?
What happens if a standard conflicts with another?
Updates to the MARC Importer
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