Tuesday, July 7, 2009

More Alphabet Soup

And now I'm feeling a bit out of my depth.

XML is not an unfamiliar acronym, neither is its meaning, or what it looks like; but what it does and where/how it works isn't yet particularly clear. However, I know that we are being taken logically, step-by-step through a process -- as I've read how others have struggled with things that have been easier for me, I've known that they will 'get it' in time and are just expecting to understand all at once.

So, even though I understand the syntax presented in the tutorials on XML and don't know yet how to apply it to the management of digital collections.... I know that all will (should?) become clear in time. One step at a time, just like Linux, just like HTML.

Following the glowing remarks by classmates about the VTC tutorial by Mark Long, I chose to work through the beginning sections of that first. Thorough, understandable, and more than sufficient to create the XML document for the assignment -- at least I hope so! Never one to try to reinvent the wheel, I took a stroll through the digital collections webpages of my home university library. Within the Advanced Search options was a drop-down menu of all the fields. I selected the subelements for my data elements from these fields (which somewhat correspond to MARC fields).


<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!-- Holding type can also be identified by first portion of id, e.g., "0001" are documents; "0002" are illustrations; "0003" are sound recordings. -->
<images>
<holding id="00001-379">
<title>The Birth of Venus</title>
<creator>Botticelli, Sandro</creator>
<type>Lithograph</type>
<subject>Goddesses, Roman</subject>
<time_period>15th Century</time_period>
<collection>Art Education</collection>
</holding>
<holding id="00002-115">
<title>Los Gatos Black</title>
<creator>Morales, Yuyi</creator>
<type>Illustration</type>
<language>Spanish</language>
<source>Los Gatos Black on Halloween</source>
<collection>Children's Literature</collection>
</holding>
<holding id="00003-411">
<title>French Resistance: a Diary</title>
<creator>Girard, Marie</creator>
<type>Sound recording</type>
<language>French</language>
<subject>World War II</subject>
<time_period>20th Century</time_period>
<collection>Oral Histories</collection>
</holding>
</images>

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