EHRI Workshop on cataloguing workflows

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Tuesday, 1 December, 2015

On November 17, 2015, EHRI invited representatives of various institutions who are responsible for managing a collection to DANS' offices in The Hague for a workshop on cataloguing workflows. The attendees represented the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the International Institute of Social History, the Jewish Historical Museum (all based in Amsterdam), the University of Sussex (Brighton, UK), Kazerne Dossin (Mechelen, Belgium) and ITS in Bad Arolsen (Germany). DANS led the workshop on behalf of EHRI.

Tools for publishing finding aids

In an effort to help collection-holding institutes provide access to descriptions of their holdings in research infrastructures such as EHRI, EHRI develops tools for transforming and publishing finding aids in standard formats. Existing tools and workflows have to be taken into account during development, or the newly developed tools will never be used because they would not connect to any use case.

Workflows for recording metadata

The workshop participants shared insights into their workflows for recording metadata about holdings and provenance, the systems that are used to create metadata and how metadata flows across systems. EHRI learned that workflows are similar, with some differences in applications used and institutes' focus on the description of either items or collections. In each institution's workflow, EAD was produced and available in one way or another.

IT providers

Some participants had more knowledge of file formats and protocols for metadata exchange than others. Most participants rely on their IT service providers to make changes to existing systems; it is not always possible to use extra tools on the computers that cataloguers use without support of the (internal) IT department.

Less advanced institutions

Participants said they valued the insights into the workflows in place at other institutions. As it turned out, the participating institutes in this workshop were already quite advanced in their recording of metadata. EHRI will continue to investigate further what tools it should develop that will also assist less advanced institutions to publish metadata.