Content Metadata– An Analysis of Etruscan Artifacts in a Museum of Archeology

Metadata schemes target resources as information-packages, without attention to the distinction between content and carrier. Most schema are derived without empirical understanding of the concepts that need to be represented, the ways in which terms representing the central concepts might best be derived, and how metadata descriptions will be used for retrieval. Research is required to resolve this dilemma, and much research will be required if the plethora of schemes that already exist are to be made efficacious for resource description and retrieval. A preliminary study was designed to see whether the bibliographic concept of “the work” could be of any relevance among artifacts held by a museum. The “works metaphor” is extended from the bibliographic to the artifactual domain by altering the terms of the definition slightly, thus: instantiation is understood as content genealogy.Case studies of Etruscan artifacts from the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology are used to demonstrate the inherence of the work in non-documentary artifacts. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: Website: © 2005 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]