OLAC Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
Steven Bird
sb at UNAGI.CIS.UPENN.EDU
Thu Dec 27 15:25:38 UTC 2001
Folks,
Recently, Gary and I had some discussion on supporting multiple languages
in the archive description (i.e. collection-level metadata), as defined in
the OLAC-PMH:
I wrote:
> I think we need to permit a lang attribute for the text-valued elements.
> The other option - specifying that English will be used - is likely to
> be unacceptable. This then raises the possibility that archives might
> want to provide these text-valued elements in multiple languages, which
> starts to sound painful. Do you have any thoughts on this?
Gary wrote:
> This is a good point. After pondering it a bit, I think the way to do it
> would not be field by field, but for the whole record. <description> is
> already multiply occurring, so if we just add a lang attribute to
> <olac-archive>, then people could generate as many archive descriptions as
> they want in as many languages as they want. That would make the
> olac-archive correspond to a table in a service provider's database that
> would be in a one-to-many relationship with the archives table, which would
> be a whole lot easier than handling one-to-many at the field level.
I agree that the lang attribute should be specified at the level of the
<olac-archive> record. Here is a mock-up for the National Archives of
Canada / Archives nationales du Canada. Lines that differ in the two
versions are prefaced with an asterisk.
<description>
<olac-archive
xmlns="http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/0.4/olac-archive"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/0.4/olac-archive
http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/0.4/olac-archive.xsd"
* lang="en"
type="institutional">
* <archiveURL>http://www.archives.ca/02/0201_e.html</archiveURL>
* <curator>Mr. Ian E. Wilson</curator>
* <curatorTitle>National Archivist of Canada</curatorTitle>
* <institution>National Archives of Canada</institution>
<institutionURL>http://www.archives.ca/</institutionURL>
* <location>395 Wellington Street, Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0N3, CANADA</location>
<synopsis></synopsis>
<access></access>
</olac-archive>
<olac-archive
xmlns="http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/0.4/olac-archive"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/0.4/olac-archive
http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/0.4/olac-archive.xsd"
* lang="fr"
type="institutional">
* <archiveURL>http://www.archives.ca/02/0201_f.html</archiveURL>
* <curator>M. Ian E. Wilson</curator>
* <curatorTitle>Archiviste national du Canada</curatorTitle>
* <institution>Archives nationales du Canada</institution>
<institutionURL>http://www.archives.ca/</institutionURL>
* <location>395, rue Wellington, OTTAWA (Ontario) K1A 0N3, CANADA</location>
<synopsis></synopsis>
<access></access>
</olac-archive>
</description>
It would be a best practice for each version of the record to provide
semantically equivalent information.
Please let us know if anyone sees a problem with this simple approach to
supporting multiple languages for collection-level metadata.
Please post any responses directly to the list (simply by replying to the
email).
Steven Bird
--
Steven.Bird at ldc.upenn.edu http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/sb
Assoc Director, LDC; Adj Assoc Prof, CIS & Linguistics
Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania
3615 Market St, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19104-2608
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