I had originally been thinking CDWA would be the way we would go and in fact my MODS schema is in many respects a crosswalk from the work I had done on CDWA.

Each record will contain several hundreds (up to thousands in some cases) of photographs, which will be updated annually, and filed with brief captions and grouped according to angle/defect of the monument photographed. I can imagine them being retrieved mostly on the basis of a “title” and “defect” linking words. These photos are for preservation monitoring. (Other photos with multiple purposes are in the 2 volumes of preservation guidelines. We might want to revise our initial thoughts treating these as normal volumes.)

I’m still open to other inputs, however.

Many thanks
Neil

I think there are a lot of acceptable patterns, and some are more usable than others in an automated environment. One of the tricks is to be able to identify the patterns and use them appropriately in an application environment.

I think we’re a long way from having these issues settled down, and indeed there is now new interest in solutions that aren’t OAI-PMH. So we’ll see. My experience as an aggregator suggests that there’s not much point in requiring people to do things a particular way. You just have to deal with what you get, and perhaps take the opportunities that arise to educate your date providers.

Diane