Management Software for Monitoring Related Versions of Cultural Heritage Artifacts for Libraries and Museums

Abstract

In cultural object conservation, tracking provenance has served as the foundational method of managing information for historical artifacts. To find data points, archivists identify related versions of an artifact at various time points. In this paper, we discuss four categories with versioned examples to display the importance of data points for identifying patterns over time through events in history, cultural heritage, performing arts, and fine arts. We describe our use of the Ashurbanipal diristry to document scholarly research regarding library tools and technologies for the preservation of cultural objects as well as the implementation of PORTAL-DOORS Project (PDP) utilities for tracing provenance and distribution of cultural objects and interoperability with bibliographic formats such as BIBFRAME and MARC from existing archival methods. KEYWORDS PORTAL-DOORS Project; time points; cultural heritage; archiving; artifact conservation. INNOVATIONS IN INFRASTRUCTUREWith the creation of cities, our definition of design principles has continuously changed to fit innovations of infrastructure in numerous fields of study. Buetow (2005) describes how biomedical database infrastructure, a fundamental archiving system, could improve the cross disciplinary transfer of knowledge between various communities. Similarly, infrastructure takes on many terms, from biomedical database infrastructure to civil engineering infrastructure which actively serves communities. During the Great Plague of London, without a plan to salvage the European sewage system, lack of maintenance led to the decline of the quality of city life (Bramanti et al., 2019). Following the plague, Bazalgette, the chief engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works in London, proposed developing a system of collectors to drain sewage that overflowed from the River Thames (De Feo et al., 2014). These design principles have served as the basis for sewage infrastructure for decades, building on the foundations of basic infrastructure to iterate more effective forms of design in the future. Universally, the creation of infrastructure can be attributed to design principles that inform its use, meaning, and underlying features. Design principles are subject to iterations, changes, or improvements that in select cases create different versions of the same entity, or a form or variant of a type or original (Ganҫarski & Jomier, 1994). To evaluate the changes between key iterations of an object between various points in time, we examine sequential points in time and their comparable versions in a variety of fields: cultural heritage, events in history, fine arts, and performing arts. IDENTIFYING PATTERNS OVER TIMEEach domain-specific field uses its own defined methods of tracking related versions of historical artifacts. We explore four fields of study that aid in identifying trends in history, including events in history, cultural heritage, performing arts, and fine arts.

Managing Bibliometrics with Contributor Roles and Literature Provenance for NPDS Metadata Records

“…For our purposes, provenance does not refer to the relatively narrow sense of why, how, and where-from input data in a database influenced the output of a query as reviewed in (Cheney et al 2009), but rather to the broader concept of who (or what automated agent) produced which version of an artifact by what process, as defined in (Moreau et al 2010). In prior work, we discussed how such a notion of provenance could apply to cultural artifacts, for which the emphasis is on physical artifacts rather than digital ones (Athreya et al 2021). Here, we focus on representing the provenance of scholarly literature, where the key artifacts are the specific versions of a document, digital or physical, and the roles people and software agents created in producing it.…”