Background

Crosswalk Introduction

One of the main challenges in the the Library and Information Sciences (LIS) is the variety and compatibility of various metadata schemas, file types, standards, implementations, both within and across the various heritage institutions.

A common way of bridging this gap for catalogers has been through the use of “crosswalks” - large tables comparing and organizing the various standards to a common set of rows relating back to their elements.

Problems with Existing Solutions

While an immense achievement and an incredibly valuable tool for catalogers making one-to-one translations between any two columns of in the table, the Getty Crosswalk is limited and clunky as a single reference due to its size and complexity.

It also has the problem of being very difficult to apply flexibly or en masse, and a particular challenge to add to, as it is centralized in the Getty Institution and not in the fullest sense “open source.”

Reason for Creating lib-re/crosswalk

I created lib-re/crosswalk as a way to address these issues and, in turn, to drastically simplifying the daily maintenance tasks of deduplication, combination, and translation taking up an immense amount of the hours spent in digital asset management (DAM).

When the project is completed, it should afford the ability for the user to translate and combine multiple records from various files, encodings, schemas, and standards into a single record in any format, instead of manually analyzing the fields and deleting or overwriting potentially valuable metadata.

Another thing that my crosswalk affords is the ability for me to play around with the possible integration between the various institutions’ metadata standards into one singular representative form. While I’ll elaborate more on that in the next post, I recognized that there are many scenarios in which the same object, item, or record is used, described, and passed between Libraries, Archives, Museums, Galleries, and Publishers.