ISSN 1478-8055
Volume 3
Number 3
Page 2/3
Issue contents
Issue contents
MoPark, short for the Interreg III Mobility and National Parks Project, is based on the premise that good management of mobility in national parks can provide a basis for natural qualities, social activities and economic progress. The project spans National Parks in many countries, one of them being The Loch Lomond and The Trossachs National Park (LLTTNP) in Scotland. This article looks at issues arising from this Scottish facet of MoPark, seen from the perspective of a Metadata Options Appraisal being conducted on behalf of LLTTNP by the Centre for Digital Library Research at Strathclyde University in Glasgow.
MoPark at Loch Lomond will develop "green tourism", aiming to combine sustainable travel in the Park (solar boats, for example) with innovative interpretation to help visitors understand and enjoy the Park better. The interpretation involves the creation of electronic Interpretive Journeys which will be mounted on Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones and will interactively "interpret" guided tours around parts of the Park for visitors - presenting video and audio clips, still images, games, and animations on aspects of landscape, history, culture, flora, fauna and the like at each of a number of "stops" on Park walks. Two interpretative journeys are planned - one to interpret a walk round Inchcailloch Island on Loch Lomond; the other to interpret a cruise on the Loch itself. The complexity of the virtual composites involved can be envisioned by considering that just one of the 15 "stops" on the Inchcailloch journey entails the interactive presentation of four audio files, a video clip, two still images, and three animations.
The two planned Interpretive Journeys are to be created within the project itself. At time of writing, each has been described in some detail and the process of creating the first has begun. However, neither the Interpretive Journeys themselves, nor, for the most part, their constituent digital objects are available for examination, either by Park staff or by the consultant conducting the Metadata Options Appraisal - a situation that has necessitated a phased approach to identifying the management issues and associated metadata requirements arising out of the planned use of Interpretive Journeys by the Park.
Phase I of the appraisal was completed half way through 2004. It concluded that the general requirement as regards the metadata needed to manage the digital objects and composites being created could readily be determined through examining Project and Park documentation and discussing these with staff, but that it would not be feasible to determine all of the detail of the requirement without creating, examining, and field-testing at least one of the proposed Interpretive Journeys. One reason for this was the need to base determination of the requirement on close examination of the objects and composites that the metadata would describe. Another, more important, reason was that Park staff had no experience of the Interpretive Journeys and their use in the field. This meant they found it difficult or impossible to answer questions posed by the appraiser relating to management requirements. A list of around 45 questions was presented to project and Park staff; representative examples are given below, providing a flavour of the types of issues encountered as a result off the need to manage Interpretive Journeys and their constituent digital objects.
All of these questions had bearing on the likely requirements as regards descriptive, administrative, and technical metadata. Some could be answered with certainty by staff prior to sight of an actual Interpretive Journey, but most could not. Accordingly, it was agreed that the best way forward was to adopt a phased approach to determining the full metadata requirement, with Phase II mainly taking place after the creation and field-testing of at least one Interpretive Journey, and Phase I specifying the general requirement and using it to determine a framework to guide the work planned for Phase II.
The core of the framework identified and agreed in Phase I was the METS: Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard. A relatively recent standard maintained by the Network Development and MARC Standards Office of the Library of Congress, METS was developed specifically by the Digital Library Federation to provide an overall framework within which metadata for all types of digital materials - text files, sound files, images, video files and so on - could be integrated. As such, it offers a flexible, coherent and standards-based framework within which to meet MoPark and National Park digital materials metadata requirements as identified in Phase I of the appraisal.
METS has all of the features necessary to meet the general requirements of the Park:
METS also has a number of other points that favour its adoption. There is a growing community of METS users in libraries, museums and archives projects and initiatives. In particular, the use of METS by major players such as the Library of Congress, the Research Libraries Group, and the Digital Library Federation itself, is an encouraging factor, as are indications that major UK players (The British Library, Oxford University, The National Library of Wales, Edinburgh University) are likely to adopt the standard.
The fact that the METS community is working to ensure the increasing availability of METS extension schemas designed to deal with a range of digital object types (text files, sound files, images, video files) in commonly accepted ways is another positive development, as is the fact it is now considered stable enough for submission to formal standards bodies such as ISO and NISO.
Since part of the Park’s mission has an educational slant, there is a possible future need to inter-operate with learning community initiatives and, hence, for inter-compatibility with IMS-PC. It is therefore encouraging that initial work on mapping between METS and IMS-CP is underway.
Finally, since long-term preservation of digital assets is an issue for the Park, the fact that METS documents can serve as "Information Packages" - containers of context information and preservation description information - within the Open Archival Information System (OAIS - pdf link) reference model and that METS was designed to work with OAIS is a further advantage of the standard.
In addition to identifying METS as the core basis of the future progression of the appraisal, Phase I work also recommended the adoption of two secondary elements as key aspects of the framework that would guide Phase II.
The first of these was the adoption, where possible and appropriate, of national and international standards relevant to the field, particular possibilities being the use of MARC or MODS for descriptive metadata and LCSH and DDC as the basis of subject description and classification for the Park's digital collections. A standards-based approach of this kind will ensure, both that MoPark remains consistent with other work going on in Scotland to ensure interoperability in the distributed Scottish Common Information Environment, and that it retains compatibility with UK-wide developments in the HILT project, which aims to ensure interoperability of subject descriptions in a multi-scheme environment using DDC as a spine and LCSH as one of a number of key schemes mapped to DDC.
The second was co-operation with other key players with similar needs and interests so as to harmonise approaches and ensure interoperability beyond Park systems (For example, the Scottish Cultural Portal project which has needs and a client group that overlap with those of MoPark).
Phase II of the MoPark Metadata Options Appraisal is now underway, with the following being a summary of expected activities:
To date only limited progress has been made, the primary reason for this being work has only recently begun on the creation of the initial Interpretive Journey and its component digital objects. Full and detailed descriptions of the proposed journeys are available to the appraisal and some progress on steps 1 and 3 of Phase II has been possible as a result. However, with only a limited resource available for carrying out the study, it is considered both difficult and unsafe to attempt to make detailed decisions on metadata requirements prior to the availability of actual Interpretive Journeys and their component objects - not only because concrete examples are a pre-requisite if the appraiser is determine realistic requirements in respect of descriptive, administrative and technical metatada, but also because feedback and advice from Park staff is an important part of determining descriptive and repository management requirements and the staff themselves need experience of actual field-tested Interpretive Journeys and their components if they are to bring their general experience of Park issues to bear.
Progress with the creation of component and composite objects is expected in the next two months and further development can proceed relatively quickly thereafter. In the meantime, the organisation charged with producing the component and composite digital objects has provided examples of digital objects of the kind likely to comprise some of the components of the first Interpretive Journey (sample video, sound, text and image files from projects unrelated to MoPark) and this has enabled some initial progress to be made with steps 2 and 3 of Phase II.
Work is continuing on steps 1-3 of Phase II, with some progress made on likely core fields for the component object examples provided. To date, this has been based mainly on examining likely requirements in respect of the UK e-GMS standard, on comparisons with other CDLR projects, and on limited technical and descriptive metadata provided with the sample objects from non-MoPark initiatives.
MoPark will continue for a further 21 months, completing at the end of September 2006 and it is now expected that the Metadata Options Appraisal - originally seen as a 10 day process that would be complete in the early stages of the main project - will complete around the same time. Although this was not entirely as originally planned by the managers of the main project, they can congratulate themselves on two fronts in respect of subsequent developments in this area. First, they recognised that, in seeking to move into a very new area of operations as regards Park activities, it was wise to conduct an initial in-depth field-tested project-based examination of the issues likely to face them as they brought the benefits of new technologies to their users and staff, and to recognise that there were major issues, not just in the area of changes to user services, but in the area of managing the digital repository that would be required to support these services. Second, whilst their early estimates of the work involved were on the low side, they did recognise that the successful future management of digital objects entailed making good early decisions about the related requirements as regards metadata for the management and description of the objects - a point that is often missed in major projects of this kind.
Funding organisations are sometimes criticised for financing too many projects which ultimately fail to produce sustainable outcomes in respect of services or other initiatives - often, justifiably so. Here, however, is a good example of the value of project-based work to organisations entering new areas where the likely impact on staff, processes, and resourcing requirements is significant. They are, if handled and planned appropriately, opportunities to learn from experience - and even mistakes - prior to taking the organisation into new areas of operation that may entail significant risk. Amongst other things, MoPark is test-driving Interpretive Journeys and an associated digital repository and their impact of users and staff - and doing so well in advance of involving the organisation to particular (and perhaps unsustainable) levels of activity and commitment. More to the point in the current context, it is learning - iteratively - about associated (and very complex) metadata requirements, thereby ensuring that good decisions are taken on this front long before the planned digital repository becomes large and unwieldy, and its metadata expensive to fix.
See: Yee, R. and Beaubien, R. (2004), A preliminary crosswalk from METS to IMS content packaging, Library Hi Tech, Vol.22 No.1, pp.69-81.
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