Gestión de colecciones digitales con esquemas de catalogación reconfigurables

Abstract

The cataloging scheme of a digital collection serves to adequately catalog (describe and classify) the objects that comprise it. Such cataloging is essential to enabling the effective exploitation of the collection, both by the collection management system (digital repository), and by the external tools used for retrieving, reproducing and adding objects. Indeed, basic functionalities such as the retrieval of resources from queries, or guided navigation, all depend on the proper cataloging of resources.In this way, in the domain of digital libraries, several standards have been proposed for the cataloging of digital objects, whose ultimate purpose is to guarantee interoperability among the different repositories and applications that manipulate the objects. However, the adoption of pre-established cataloging schemata may not be a satisfactory solution in those scenarios where cataloging schemata, instead of being established a priori, are artifacts that change and evolve throughout the entire collection’s life cycle (the rationality of this evolving nature is to adapt to changing cataloging requirements and needs, which are not known at the beginning of the collection, but appear and mature as the collection grows and evolves). We realized this fact during our collaboration with different humanities groups in different domains (archeology, conventional literature, digital literature, creative writing, etc.). From these experiences we learned that the inductive definition of cataloging schemata (i.e., the concurrent evolution of schemata and collections), far from being an exception, is the norm for the production of very specific collections, often oriented to research and teaching...