I reprise the image of the mosaicked version of metadata to stand for my travails in cataloging my mosaics in various systems. Travails with…consistency. To sum up, I have
willingly adapted, melted and remolded, my headings to the strengths of the system in hand: Drupal, DSpace, EPrints. Each has had an adequate method for handling access to my collection…a very simple collection. I am hampered by a probable lack of imagination about my own collection, and by the fact that it is not as wide-ranging, yet, as I wish and hope. The artist self wants to track materials, costs, predominant colors…sales-minded. The…different self wants these original works to live alongside examples from all eras in all styles as a subject collection. Part self-archiving, part subject repository pulled from all over. To be brutally honest: I haven’t even been consistent in titling my works. Awful. Cataloger’s prerogative: not to be consistent when off the clock.
I would not have considered Library of Congress if EPrints had not offered it out of the box; and through misunderstanding, I stuck with LCSH longer than I might have in EPrints. I built a strange animal from the LC class NK, Decorative arts Applied arts Decoration and ornament, two additional levels deep (4 principal subheadings) purely to suit my materials. My impression of subject handling in Drupal and DSpace, somewhat muddied now but refreshed briefly by glancing again at those two VMs, is that they were both unsystematic, relying heavily on free keywords. EPrints invited me to think more broadly about my collection and toward the content I have not yet added. The two Ds encouraged my microvision, my focus on color, material name, and other very grounded details.
The truth revealed: metadata is/are better when the system prompts it/them better. EPrints required that I go to trouble if I wanted to dumb down my description, adding separate taxonomies; the other guys require going to some trouble to upload LCSH or another formal taxonomy/thesaurus (I believe it is possible in both). EPrints, in further truth, caused me to think harder about facets of my mosaic work though I did not, technically, have facets. I did make use of free text in addition to LCSH, but it was more riveting to try to tweak the LC levels.
The thought after the truth: know your subject and think big. Then find a system that thinks big ahead of you.