4.1 Mapping the Edinburgh Recommendations to the AHDS Core
	4.2 Recommended Qualifiers for use in the AHDS Core

It became evident as a result of the process of consultation concerning the Edinburgh Recommendations, that the solutions suggested, especially those in 2.2 were a logical way of reconciling the high granularity resource discovery needs of the museum, visual arts and cultural heritage community with the simple structure of the Dublin Core. (The examples in 3.5, which represent actual implementations of the Edinburgh Recommendations attest to this efficacy).

However, as a result of the complexity and domain specificity of some of the solutions offered in the Edinburgh Recommendations, it is not recommended that they are adopted for a wholesale AHDS wide implementation. Those recommendations which VADS does believe could be universally adopted if desired, are detailed in 4.2. Further levels of complexity, such as the distinctions between visual arts and museum objects and their analogue and digital surrogates will in future be documented in the VADS on-line catalogue to ensure that object based resource discovery requirements are met by the Service.

It is however important to recognise the need to strike a balance between a bland vanilla flavoured AHDS core which does not represent a significant departure from current versions of Dublin Core, and an overly complex structure, which in trying to take account of domain-specific retrieval requirements, is anathema to interoperability and cross-domain searching. While the whole workshop series and its reporting process does tend to beg the question - how far are there common resource discovery requirements between the five arts and humanities subjects areas which can be embodied in an AHDS level core? - overall the workshop series can be seen as a very significant achievement in the process of identifying the core resource discovery requirements of each subject domain and highlighting the problems and issues which are inherent in the general solution offered by the use of Dublin Core. The Visual Arts Data Service is also happy to endorse the addition of schemes and types recommended by other Service Providers which can be interpreted in a common manner, and in this spirit would like to recommend the following qualifiers for universal adoption where applicable.

4.2.1 CREATOR

CREATOR Qualifier	Description
birthDate	This should ideally be a single date, but if needed, a range of dates or a qualified date e.g.. circa or active could also be recorded here
deathDate	This should ideally be a single date, but if needed, a range of dates or a qualified date e.g. Circa or active could also be recorded here
birthPlace	This would refer to the place of birth of the creator, nationality if different could be referred to under culture
culture	This could contain tribal, nationality, religious, racial or other "cultural" information pertinent to the identity of the creator(s)
gender	male, female and unknown are a possible set of values for this qualifier.

 

4.2.2 SUBJECT

While it should be noted that the full list of SUBJECT qualifiers defined in the Edinburgh Recommendations (see 2.6.2) are clearly of use for visual arts, cultural heritage and museums resource discovery, in the interests of interoperability a more simple definition of SUBJECT, as information pertaining to the content of the object or resource, has resulted in the reduced list of qualifiers which appear below. With this definition in mind, qualifiers which were suggested to allow the description of the material qualities of an object, such as subject.process and subject.dimensions, have not been recommended for AHDS wide implementation, nor have those which refer to the location of the object such as subject.currentRepository.

SUBJECT Qualifier	Description
artType	A name used to define an art objecte.g. sculpture, painting, architecture, furniture, ceramic, installation etc.
artMovement	Name given to an association of individuals with a specific agenda or manifesto e.g. Cubism, Fauvism, Bauhaus etc.
style	The name of a style, period or school associated with the object e.g. Mannerist, Baroque, Rococo, Neo-classical, Gothic, Renaissance, Siennese School, Workshop of Rembrandt etc.
context	Information relevant to the historical/social/cultural context depicted in or embodied in the object e.g. Russian Revolution, slavery, fishing, etc.
iconography	e.g. Virgin and Child, Apollo and Daphne, Last Supper etc. Where possible, clarify using SCHEME e.g. ICONCLASS
person	The name of any person associated with the object; this person could be relevant as a result of their influence over the creative process that resulted in the object, or because they are depicted or represented in the work itself. Sub-qualifiers may be appended to further clarify the nature of the association, although for brevity this has not been attempted here

 

4.2.3 RELATION

RELATION Qualifier	Description
IsMemberOf	Used to indicate the containment of a resource within a larger entity such as a database or collection.
IsChildOf	Used to indicate a hierarchical relationship between the resource and its higher-level parent
IsParentOf	Used to indicate a hierarchical relationship between the resource and its lower-level offspring. N.B. This has been included for consistency with other proposals, although its use is not recommended for practical reasons as the need to describe both parent and child relationships for all related resources will prove unnecessarily time consuming.

 

4.2.4 Recommended SCHEME Qualifiers

Value	Scheme
AAT	Art and Architecture Thesaurus
DDC	Dewey Decimal Classification
ICONCLASS	ICONCLASS
LCSH	Library of Congress Subject Headings
LCTGM	Library of Congress Thesaurus for Graphic Materials
MDA	Museum Documentation Association Code
RCHME	RCHME/English Heritage Thesaurus
SHIC	Social History and Industrial Classification
TGN	Thesaurus of Geographic Names
UDC	Universal Decimal Classification
ULAN	Union List of Artist Names
X-LocalScheme	Values for locally-deployed schemes that are not registered may be identified as such using the ‘X-’ prefix

	1. Introduction
	2. The Workshop Results and the Edinburgh Recommendations
	3. Consultative and Editorial Process
	5. Mapping the Dublin Core to other Standards
	6. Annexes
	Footnotes
	Acknowledgements

AHDS Visual Arts is part of the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS). Copyright 2003.