CCO in Action - Related Work Context
Video Transcript

In this video we’ll look at the guidance CCO provides for representing relationships
not only between works and images, but also to other related works.

As the focus of this example, here’s a dress from the Vassar College Costume
Collection that was worn by a student carrying the Daisy Chain, a commencement
tradition at Vassar. For this collection, the artifacts of clothing are considered the
central focus of the collection. Images of that individual garment are considered to
be images of that work. However there are also other artifacts related to the
garment, like this letter from a donor and a photograph of their mother wearing the
dress. Related works like this might be in the VCCC, or in the college’s Archives
and Special Collections.

Here are some highlights from the work record for this dress. This collection uses
Omeka for web publishing, with a combination of Dublin Core and VRA Core
elements as a structural standard and CCO as the content standard guiding how
the entries are formatted.

Principle #8 from CCO is important here: “Be consistent in establishing relationships
between works and images, between a group or collection and works, among works,
and among images.”

Examples shown here use the display format used in CCO, with the related work in a
label form that concatenates the title, work type, creator display, and repository
information for items in external collections. Other specific structural or encoding
standards may approach this differently, for example entering the relationship type
and identifier of the related work separately, or supporting different ways of linking
both internally and externally, especially to include URIs for linked data.
The main thing is that “Relationships should be displayed in a way that is clear to
the end user.” (p. 18)

CCO also recommends the use of reciprocal relationships, meaning that each side
of the relationship points to the other. Ideally this is functionality built into your
system so that when one relationship is entered, the other is created automatically.
CCO and other standards offer guidance on specific terminology to represent
different types of relationships, including the different phrasing that is appropriate
for each side of the relationship, as you see in the table here and in the examples
in the following slides.

Any images of this object can be linked through Image Records, which all refer
back to the same object but may have different views, dates, or rights, etc.
In this work record for the related photograph, note the different agents, dates,
extents, etc., along with how the reciprocal relationships are identified.
Here also is the work record for the related letter.

These relationships would mostly be considered as extrinsic relationships. CCO
defines an intrinsic relationship as one that is essential and must be recorded to
enable effective searches. Common intrinsic relationships are whole/part
relationships, group / collection relationships, and series relationships.
The artifacts shown in this example are mainly able to stand alone, and their
relationship is not essential, except perhaps for the letter, which is only in the
collection because of its reference to the dress and is probably not of interest to
researchers outside of that.

The photograph and letter we have looked at is in the Vassar College Costume
Collection itself, but there are many other related materials in Vassar’s Archives
and Special Collections Library. What would it look like to express that kind of
external relationship?

Here’s an example of the finding aid for the collection that holds many photographs
like the one shown previously, with some examples of folders in the container list
that might relate to this dress. At the top is how the relation display could appear
with citation information and an external link.
Some individual items have even been digitized in Vassar’s digital library and could
be linked even more directly.

Here’s another finding aid, this time to Vassar’s extensive Student Materials
Collection, which includes letters, some of which discuss the Daisy Chain tradition.
Even better, some of these have been digitized and the finding aid links directly to
the digitized item in the Digital Library, as show here in blue.
Again, this could be linked directly from the record for the dress. Reciprocal
relationships pointing from the archive to the costume collection are not likely to be
prioritized unless the relationship were to be intrinsic, for example if they did hold a
letter which did specifically mention a dress in our collection. In that case a link to
the work record for the dress could also be provided in the related material section
of the finding aid or in a relation field in the record for a specific letter.
Different systems can structure and display these relationships in different ways.

As mentioned before, the VCCC is currently using Omeka as a content
management system. In Omeka, works are considered as “Items” and Images are
“Files” attached to those items. Items can also be related to each other as related
works.

When relationships are expressed with standardized identifiers, it can add even
more functionality for display.

For Vassar, the template for the page display for each work shows a grid of related
thumbnail images at the top of the page, the metadata for the work under that, and
then a grid of thumbnail images for related works at the bottom. Some more
visually oriented users who are less attentive to the relationships when expressed
as text in the metadata are more likely to click on those thumbnail images to
explore further.

Also, as seen in the work records shown earlier, the individual records can link to
online exhibits, like the one shown here, where the artifacts have been highlighted
and discussed in a more interpretive setting.