Framework for photographic archives interoperability

Interoperability and the exchange of metadata between photographic archives has become an important issue for archives digitizing their collections. However, due to incompatible metadata formats and incompatible storage and dissemination software, interoperability is hard to achieve. In order to facilitate these archives and tackle aforementioned problems, we propose a framework using an extensive component based data element set for photographic metadata (SEPIADES) in combination with the XML based Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Using this framework, archives can assemble their own application profile consisting of SEPIADES elements and use this as a metadata format for description, storage and dissemination of photographic metadata records. Due to the general nature of the problems being solved by this framework, it is proposed that a standardization effort will follow based on the framework. As a consequence, this effort will provide an improved way to access multiple collections based on established standards.