Stanford University News Service
& the Need to Unify Metadata for Multiple Media Formats in Data Silos

Context
PBCore Integration
Contacts

Other Case Examples

The Stanford University New Service is the public information face for the educational institution. The department publishes public relations information, accepts calls and research inquiries from the media, organizes film and interview requests, edits the weekly newspaper for faculty and staff, writes and organizes bios, and collects and catalogs photographs, video clips and programs about the University, its departments, mission, and visiting dignitaries and guest speakers. The News Service also manages the archive of press releases.

The primary challenge is to locate and manage disparate media formats, while cataloging each with a consistent metadata dictionary that supports unified searchability of these assets and their retrieval. Integrating different metadata schemas is gaining momentum as a priority. The News Service uses the VRA Core metadata standard (from the Cultural Heritage Communities) to tag many of its assets, but has found its elements do not always pertain to their needs.

Because Canto Cumulus already has a presence on campus within numerous departments, Stanford IT is placing on its strategic priority list the evaluation and possible implementation of Cumulus products on a campus-wide basis. From the News Service's point of view, an enterprise solution would facilitate consistent metadata cataloging as well as improve timely retrieval of assets for further distribution or disbursal.

The News Service recognizes they should be using or at least advocating for the same metadata descriptions and schemas across all the different information and asset management systems encountered on campus. Findability has been seriously hampered because of isolated information silos. Upon discovering PBCore through word-of-mouth and its website, they were impressed with its completeness, good documentation, well-defined metadata elements, and PBCore's ability to describe many different media formats and types. PBCore held great promise for meeting their needs.

A FileMaker database was created by the News Service to index video assets; about half of the items were cataloged. They have since designed another FileMaker database with its field definitions based on PBCore. This will be used to catalog newer videos with PBCore compliant descriptions, although data entry has yet to begin. With the publication of the PBCore FileMaker Cataloging Tool at the end of September 2007, the News Service will examine its indexing, reporting, and export features.

Canto Cumulus is currently in use to manage the photographic collection, using the VRA Core metadata standard. The News Service intends to implement PBCore as the metadata dictionary within Cumulus.

A serious issue is dealing with legacy data and the need to crosswalk that metadata into PBCore compliant records. One of their tasks to proof and edit old data as it moves into newer cataloging and management systems. Using PBCore as the "dictionary of record" is judged to be a worthy and productive pursuit.

CONTACTS:

Other Case Examples