[uf-discuss] Citation: next steps?

[Kerri Hicks]

On Aug 30, 2006, at 11:21 PM, Timothy Gambell wrote:

>
> Yeah, the semantic markup situation is pretty messy in the museum  
> world, too. There are some credible efforts to come to some  
> consensus about how we describe works of art, but I'm not going to  
> hold my breath.

No kidding. Recently I've been working a lot with MODS and METS  
records for items in a digital repository, and there's a problem  
we're consistently running into.

When you have a digital photograph, for example, and the photograph  
is of, say, a sculpture, what are you cataloging? Who is the creator?  
Is it the artist who created the sculpture, or the photographer who  
took the picture? What I've been doing is adding multiple creators  
with explanatory roles (e.g. one creator with a role of sculptor, and  
one with a role of photographer).

This gets even more convoluted, though -- does the metadata relate to  
the subject of the photograph (1 sculpture, wood, six feet tall, 400  
pounds), or is it the photograph itself (1 photograph, JPEG format,  
300 pixels per inch, 4" x 6")?

*sigh*

Best,
Kerri