Ali Post

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Resume


Mark
METADATA APPLICATION PROFILE:
Streaming Performance Art Videos


The Hemispheric Institute of Performance (Hemi) researches, documents, and amplifies politically engaged culture and performance; performance art videos make up a part of their collection. I worked with a team to create a metadata application profile (MAP) for creating records for streaming the performance art videos. The MAP includes functional requirements, project values, a domain model, element set, metadata entry form, cataloging guidelines, and crosswalk. Our MAP is a framework for creating consistent, good-quality metadata to increase search and retrieval capabilities for Hemi users. This project was completed for INFO 663 Metadata Design

In this semester-long project, our team completed a series of assignments that built on each other to create the MAP. As a group, we wanted our decision making process to be collaborative and informed by our project values. We came up with a list of project principles that would achieve the functional requirements both practically and ethically; these were inspired by work done already by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, the Design Justice Network, the Getty, and Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein. We then created a domain model using the tool Lucidchart. Based on the entities, attributes, and relationships that we defined and structured in the domain model, we created an element set of fields to describe the streaming videos, and pulled corresponding elements from PBCore, VRA Core, and METS Rights. We used google sheets for both the element set and the metadata entry form. Finally, we created a crosswalk for our MAP to schema.org.

Through this project, I saw how values shape systems of information preservation. After defining our project principles at the very beginning, we regularly referred back to them as we made decisions about things as abstract as the domain model, and as minute as name format rules for the metadata entry form. These values were based on the goals of the project, as defined by the assignment (the functional requirements), and also by our own discussions as a group about information access and preserving the integrity of creators and previous catalogers. 

Read the final report.


Mark