A Study on a Metadata Model of Cultural Heritage Digital Archives as anIntellectual Creation by Memory Institutions
Student No: 201626098
Name: Winda Monika
Adoption of Web 2.0 and Semantic Web technologies in cultural heritage digital archives
have brought significant changes to memory institutions such as Museums, Libraries and Archives.
Digital exhibition of cultural heritage is an important function for memory institutions. Digital
exhibition requires highly intellectual process for their creation - from planning, selecting, editing,creating the digital surrogates of cultural heritage objects (CHOs) to providing access to the digitalsurrogates. In this study, the overall process to create digital exhibitions and people who engage inthis process are called digital curation and digital curators, respectively.
There are several metadata standards useful for digital archives. CIDOC CRM (ConceptualReference Model) is a well-known standard ontology for museums. FRBRoo, which is an extensionof CIDOC-CRM, defines ontology for describing bibliographic entities defined by an IFLA standard
Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records (FRBR). IFLA - Library Reference Model (LRM)
is a model which is covering all aspects of bibliographic data (a consolidation of FRBR, FRSAD, andFRAD). These standards are used in this study as its basis. In a preliminary study, the author proposeda model to describe cultural heritage resources presented in digital space and investigated an
applicability of FRBR WEMI to the cultural heritage resources. The preliminary research had a basison the CHDE (Cultural Heritage in Digital Environment) model designed for digital archives ofintangible and tangible cultural heritage.
Based on the preliminary study and an analysis on metadata extracted from British Museumand Europeana, the author found that a digital exhibition of cultural heritage deals with multiple levelsof metadata, i.e., metadata for describing an exhibition as a single instance, parts of the exhibition andeach component of exhibition. She analyzed entities of exhibitions to define a metadata model fromthe viewpoint of “digital exhibition as an intellectual creation.” The result showed that FRBR WEMI
is a suitable model to identify entities of the digital exhibition and describe them based on theintellectual creation process occurred in the digital exhibition.
This thesis shows that digital exhibition metadata is item-centric, where a curated digital
instance and digital instance are considered as an Item. Links enable to comprehend the descriptionof the contextual information. Through the connection of Items, Work and Expression can be
eventually identified. On the other hand, as links will make connections among objects complicated,
we need a metadata model which appropriately represents digital exhibitions in which links acrossobjects may be more complicated. The author defined a model for describing digital exhibitions andtheir components based on FRBR WEMI. This study used RDA to experimentally describe theproposed model. From these investigations, the author concluded the applicability of FRBR WEMI todigital cultural heritage archives to clearly identify entities of intellectual creation and physicalembodiments.

Academic Advisors: Principal: Shigeo SUGIMOTO
Secondary: Mitsuharu NAGAMORI