Humanities and Social Sciences

Art History

Visual Resources - MDID Project

Digital Images integrating slides and photographs

The MDID2 Project is funded by Information Technology Services at La Trobe University.

Digital images were being delivered out of different 3 databases partly aimed at piloting the systems in use at La Trobe University:- the Art History Filemaker server database; the Library Image Database (Access); and, MDID. Digital images are catalogued in a database developed with Filemaker Pro Software and were exported to the relevant applications.

The Filemaker database structure for cataloguing artworks required a major restructure, to take into account the newly developed VRA Core 4 (extension of Dublin Core) XML schema for cataloguing cultural objects, officially released April 2007. This was developed by the Visual Resources Association and a standard officially endorsed by the METS(Medadata Encoding & Transmission Standard) editorial Board, maintained by the Library of Congress, and being developed by the Digital Library Federation. In addition, VRA Core 4 is a data structure that underpins the new metadata standards governing the data content for the Cataloguing of Cultural Objects (CCO), released and published by American Library Association, 2006.

It was evident that a more streamlined, efficient and effective database management system and cataloguing module were needed not only to facilitate the research, but flow through to the teaching and learning of Art History.

The project aims to firstly, integrate all the digital images, slide catalogue records and photographs into the one application, MDID. Secondly, a new Java based desktop application cataloging tool, JavaCat, is being developed to dynamically link to the SQL database backend of MDID.

The MDID2 project aims to be complete by the close of 2007.