Within the searchable Education by Design image collection management system designed by CONTENTdm, there are over 700 images of individual items from the Bienes Center's WPA Museum Extension Project (MEP) Collection. For each image, a descriptive cataloging record, or metadata, is created which is then matched with the metadata for each image. At the discretion of the site administrator, CONTENTdm allows for selected fields from each record to be searchable.

This raised several challenges of a cataloging nature. First, it became necessary to enter descriptive cataloging information for each individual image entered into the collection management system. Throughout the Education by Design website, we have liberally used the words "item" or "object" or "artifact" to describe anything from the collection. This can include a single image of a costume plate from a set, or it could even include the set itself. Similarly with the word "set." We've used that word to describe any group of items that were produced for use together. However, for more precision in our metdata records, we've used three other terms to describe sets: series (the largest, or parent set), sub-series 1 (the child set), and sub-series 2 (the smallest, or grandchild set). Not all sets are sub-divided down to the sub-series 2 level; some are not sub-divided at all. None are sub-divided further than the sub-series 2 level.  

Each individual image does not necessarily correspond to what is typically referred to as an item in the realm of library cataloging. There, the term "item" would refer to a book, work, object or piece cataloged as a single entity. One wouldn't catalog each individual chapter or page in a book. Neither would we, for example, normally catalog each individual lantern slide in a particular set of slides. But we would want an individual image of every slide in the set in constructing an image database. Thus, we need to extend our descriptive cataloging to provide metadata at the image level. In a sense, this is akin to cataloging each page of a book.  

Cataloging at the image level rather than the item level also meant that we needed to also enter descriptive information for some of the technical aspects of the digitization process as well. CONTENTdm has the capability to harvest some of this data when images are uploaded to the system, such as file size, pixel dimensions, and file format. Other technical metadata was manually entered by the Digital Librarian.

The biggest challenge from a cataloging point of view concerned the determination of the content of the descriptive metadata for each image. Let's take the example of the lantern slide depicted above. How would we describe that image?

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Metadata resources found on this website:

About the Original Catalogs Used for Ordering WPA Visual Aids - From here, you may view a few of the original promotional catalogs used by Pennsylvania and New Jersey and gain a sense of how the objects were described and arranged.

Data Dictionary - Definitions for fields used in the WPA Museum Extension Project Collection image database powered by CONTENTdm.

Metadata Crosswalk - Mapping the fields between our image database, the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES), a metadata schema for cataloging electronic resources, and the MARC Standards used throughout the library world.

File Naming Convention - Documentation of the specifications we used for creating file names for our high-resolution archival images.

Other resources on metadata:

Dublin Core Metadata Initiative

Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 Third Edition - W3C Recommendation, Feb. 4, 2004.

Introduction to Metadata: Pathways to Digital Information (from the Getty Research Institute)

Mapping Between Metadata Formats (by Michael Day of UKOLN)

Metadata Resources (from the Colorado Digitization Program)

Understanding MARC Bibliographic (from the Library of Congress)

W3CSchools Online Web Tutorials