Technical Committee Notes

10 January 2000

The following people attended the meeting: Stephen Yearl (CHS) , Eva Bolkovac (CHS), Richard Frieder (CHS), Patrick McGlamery (UConn), Rutherford Witthus (UConn), Leah Prescott (Mystic), and James Blackaby (Mystic).

After preliminary discussion, the team arrived at the following statement: We will identify the variables needed to enhance the records within our native systems, from which we can extract the elements needed for discovering and retrieving project data in a web-based environment.

Four elements need further discussion: 1) Dublin Core will guide the creation of metadata; 2) A geographic component is essential for searching for and retrieving digital objects; 3) A cataloging/procedural manual must be drafted immediately; and 4) We must determine to what degree this is a preservation and access project.

We discussed briefly content standards, open source software, spatial data input tools, how records would be extracted from the institutions' databases, and the advantages/disadvantages of using MARC records.