Digital collections

Digital collections are at the heart of the MICHAEL system. It it thus not surprising to learn that they are the most difficult to describe, because they have a lot of descriptive fields and some of them are very specific.

1) Overview of the form

Digital collection records may be created with a form divided in five parts or screens:

A) Identification and description

Identifier and title form the Identification section. The description section contains fields for description, legal status, language, digital document format and type, content type, collection size and accruals.

B) Subject indexing

This screen contains fields for category, subject, period, culture, spatial coverage, famous people, place, event or item, and dates. Lists of possible values are provided for many of these fields.

C) Illustrations

In this screen, you may upload illustration of the digital collection such as a digital image.

D) Links towards other records and external resources

A very important section for the digital collection record, in order to build the relationship information at the heart of the MICHAEL data model.

E) System metadata and local data

As for any record type, some system information is defined here.

Most of the information is contained within the first two screens.

2) Illustrations

In a MICHAEL database, only the digital collection records may contain illustrations. An illustration is a digital object that illustrates the digital collection described. Although the production module may handle any kind of digital data as an illustration, the MICHAEL publishing module handles only images in the common Web formats (JPEG, PNG, ...).

When creating or editing a record, you may have an empty list of illustrations. In that case, you may see something like:

To add an illustration, just click on the + button. Whenever you need to add a new one, click on that button again. In theory, there can be an unlimited number of illustrations added to a record.

An illustration is composed of four pieces of information.

Title

The title or legend of the illustration.

Author

The creator (photograph for instance) of the illustration.

Legal status

A statement about the legal status of the illustration.

Source files

The source or media files for this illustration, such as JPEG file. See below for more information on source files.

The part of the form used to fill in the first three pieces of information is very simple and looks like this:

For the source files, you need to click the + button beside the Source files label. This will add a new group of fields. You may repeat to add more than one source file. The publishing platform will currently support two source files for images, one for a thumbnail and another for a full screen display.

Once you add a new source file, the form looks like:

For each source file, you need to select its role – whether thumbnail or full screen – and you need to provide the file itself. To do so, click on the Browse button (the exact label depends on your browser) and select the file on your computer. Once you submit the form, the appropriate information for the format and MIME type will be added automatically. When you edit a record with an already provided image, you can replace it by clicking on the same button.

Images are store in the database, in a subfolder named medias from the folder where the record is.

3) Links

Links are very important for digital collections, because in the MICHAEL system all relationships directly involving a digital collection must be described in the digital collection record. Also, all records should be linked to at least one digital collection.