Job Posting for American Archive Executive/Senior Director
This could be a very nice job for someone:
"To provide leadership and strategic direction in guiding and implementing all aspects of the American Archive, public broadcasting's comprehensive archive of valuable radio and television programming, ensuring its collection, management and preservation..."
Also, the position involves "working with the system on the growth and evolution of PBCore and related metadata models..." It seems clear from this and from earlier discussions at CPB that the management of PBCore and the American Archive are likely to be closely linked.
For the full job announcement etc., see: http://cpb.org/jobline/index.php?mode=print_listing&listing_id=6674
PBCore en Español
I've just returned from a week in Mexico, where I participated in the Seminario de Conservación de Obras y Documentos Sobre Soportes Electrónicos. You can see more information (in Spanish) about it here: http://cmm.cenart.gob.mx/seminario09/index.html
One of the things I was responsible for was teaching a workshop on Documentación de Programas de Televisión. There were 16 participants from various TV station archives and other institutions that collect television materials. And of course I taught them PBCore (as well as overviews of PREMIS, Dublin Core, METS, and various rights standards)! It was taught in English, but I did my best to provide them with a translation of the PBCore element names (see below). This of course really got me thinking about how great it would be to have pbcore supported in multiple languages, but that's probably a long ways off, and would require some pretty dedicated multi-lingual volunteers.
Anyhow, Thanks to Dave Rice's help with figuring out the Spanish-language support in Media Info, we were able to install that tool en Español on all the participant's PCs, so they could extract technical metadata from digital files in Spanish! We then practiced cataloging using the pbcore.vermicel.li tool, which worked fantastic. Some of the participants didn't quite finish creating their records, but some did a pretty nice job, especially with the technical metadata. You can take a look at the results here: http://pbcore.vermicel.li/. The records for Steal this Film, Edison in Mexico, Wash Day in Mexico, and A Clever Dummy are all the students work.
Here is the BASIC pbcore element list in Spanish. It doesn't get into the actual semantics of the element names, and for that reason doesn't get into essenceTracks. The idea was more to give a general translation of terms that are used in pbcore. If any bilingual folks are lurking here, let me know what you think.
A lot of this translation was thanks to Media Info's English to Spanish mapping, and Dublin Core translation to Spanish.
Identifer Identificador
Title Título
Subject Tema
Description Descripción
Genre Género
Relation Relación
Coverage Cobertura
Creator Creador
Contributor Colaborador
Publisher Editorial
Date Fecha
Language Idoma
Version Versión
Identifer Identificador
File Name Nombre del Archivo
Date Created Fecha de Codificación
Format Formato
Location Ubicación
Media Type Tipo de Medio
Generation Generación
Broadcast Standard Sistema de Codificación y Transmisión
Codec Códec
File Size Tamaño del Archivo
Duration Duración
Data Rate / Bit Rate Tasa de Bits
Resolution / Bit Depth Resolución
Sampling Rate Velocidad de muestreo
Frame Size (Width x Height) Ancho x Alto (del cuadro)
Aspect Ratio Relación de Aspecto
Frame Rate Velocidad de Cuadro
Tracks Pistas
Channels Canales
pbcore wordles
(Published on behalf of Kara Van Malssen who created these images.)
I'm a big nerd. I spent the last hour making wordles out of the pbcore elements. Its for a slideshow I'm putting together. It was so much fun to see the elements in colorful wordcloud form, that I just kept making them.
The biggest font are the mandatory elements, medium font are recommended elements, and small font are optional elements. I didn't include the essenceTrack sub-elements, but everything else should be there. Feel free to use these, or make your own at http://www.wordle.net.
Comparison between PBCore and VMD for Technical Media Metadata
VMD stands for Video Metadata and is a schema resulting from the Library of Congress AudioVisual Prototype Project. The documented schema lives at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/mets/Schemas/VMD.xsd and was last updated in 2003. From the annotation in the schema:
“VIDEOMD contains technical metadata that describe a digital video object. It is based upon metadata defined by LC. VIDEOMD contains 36 top-level elements.”
Carl Fleischhauer of the Library of Congress oversaw that activity and he reports that, in the end, the actual digitization was limited to audio and thus the VMD schema was never used by the project. He added that the community's renewed interest in technical metadata means that this is an excellent time to revisit the topic and consider how best to document the relevant facts about video objects.
PBCore is a schema as well as a set of tools resulting from funding by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The documented schema lives at http://www.pbcore.org/PBCore/PBCoreXSD_Ver_1-2-1.xsd and was last updated in February 2009. From http://www.pbcore.org:
“The Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary (PBCore) is … a core set of terms and descriptors (elements) … used to create information (metadata) … that categorizes or describes …media items (sometimes called assets or resources).”
VMD and PBCore both contain specifications for technical metadata describing video. Since these “standards” were created at different times within different environments and represent two of only a few available options this blog post offers a comparison of each of their advantages.
VMD is designed to document the technical attributes of a single video object (one video file or one videotape) to be incorporated into a METS document. A METS document may contain multiple VMD instances with structural metadata describing the relationships between them. In contrast to VMD, PBCore is designed to support documentation of multiple video objects and their structure and relationships within a single record. Given these differences, meaningful comparative analysis requires identifying the appropriate level within PBCore to compare with VMD. VMD is roughly the semantic equivalent to the PBCore’s instantiation element and sub-elements which will serve here as the level of comparison.
The objective of performing this analysis is two-fold. First, to highlight some differences that may be helpful to those considering using either one of these schemas, and second, to identify specific strengths and weaknesses, some of which may prove to be valuable points of consideration for future alteration of both standards.
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