New to PBCore
I am doing freelance work for a PB station, and we are not yet using PBCore. This could change soon, however, so I am wanting to know about PBCore's cataloging abilities. Our station is about to move into a new building and has 50 years worth of media. It has been haphazardly stored in some places (space and staff limitations) and nobody seems to know who has what. I have a librarian background and the idea is being bandied about to have some sort of checkout system for media. It would also be beneficial to have an online catalog for the station that employees could access. What I want to know is, how does PBCore function as far as cataloging? Is there any means of being able to check out materials to employees? Forgive me if I'm showing my ignorance; I had never heard of PBCore until last week when I started working here! Thanks.Comments:
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Hi Trisha,
Checkout transaction information came up while Winter Shanck and I were designing functional requirement goals for the PBCore Record Repository at WNET (public version http://pbcore.vermicel.li/, login admin:secret). We considered strategies for including checkout information within a PBCore extension or instantiation annotation; however we eventually figured that checkout details were outside the scope of PBCore and that this information is more private to the local organization.
Eventually basic transactions were implemented into the tool, but this data is related to instantiations and not a part of it, so it doesn’t appear in the PBCore XML, just in the admin interface.
So to answer your question, I’d say that PBCore functions well for cataloging descriptive and technical metadata, but checkout data is more in the administrative category of metadata that PBCore wasn’t designed to cover.
Dave Rice
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Like Dave says, PBCore is good for cataloging and expressing descriptive and technical metadata. It’s not designed to facilitate checking out items in a digital asset management system or something. You might have such a system, and set it up to use PBCore as a data structure, but the “checkout” feature would be part of the system and not part of PBCore.
We’re just starting to experiment with Final Cut Server, which does have checkout functionality, so it might work great in the situation you’re describing. I hope to set up the FCS system with the PBCore data model, but I’m not sure how this’ll work getting PBCore XML out of the system. We’ll find out and report back!
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