Recordkeeping Innovation was involved in the development of a metadata standard to act as the framework for data extraction and unification within a portal environment (virtual digital repository), working across Singapore's archives and museums. Each institution had a separate inventory system, with different protocols, metadata and descriptive standards.
This project assessed cultural heritage portal projects internationally, determined the most appropriate standards to adopt at this time, and recommended an application profile of Dublin Core be adopted. Once the standard was approved we undertook extensive mappings between the underlying systems and the standards to enable the automatic data extraction from the base systems for use by the public across all the institutions.
The project also aimed to improve accessibility and enable navigation on the web to cultural heritage resources. We developed a subject taxonomy for cultural heritage resources, developed from existing work, rather than commencing from the beginning. Getty's AAT was recommended for its breadth particularly in the art and history museums, supplemented by the UNESCO thesaurus (already used as a basis in the UK's archival portal).
We proposed a single SCROL thesaurus based on these two tools, significantly edited, to meet the requirements. A collaborative methodology was used for development and negotiation of the taxonomy.
This work was highly regarded in Singapore, resulting in a paper presented to the Dublin Core meeting held in Singapore in 2007 (accessible at http://dcpapers.dublincore.org/ojs/pubs/article/viewArticle/873)
