About the Union Catalog
Who contributes records to the MIC Catalog?
How many titles are in the Catalog?
Overview
The MIC Union Catalog brings together in one place catalog records for individual moving images collected and managed by a number of organizations, enabling users to search for moving images across multiple collections. To search the catalog, use Collections Explore.
Information for each moving image includes title, date, physical format(s), credits, and subject information, with information about the organization holding the moving image. Some records include links to moving images available for immediate download or streaming.
The MIC Union Catalog provides access to the moving images within the collections of MIC participating organizations.
The MIC Union Catalog is unique in several ways. First, it uses an innovative architecture which concatenates data from the participant's Archive Directory entry to each bibliographic record that is displayed to the user. Thus, users are presented with description, access policies and contact information in a single lookup.
Second, the archival moving image field is marked by diversity: diversity in collections, institutional types, missions, user groups, and available resources. Therefore, organizations catalog their moving images according to a variety of content standards, metadata schema, and methods. MIC's Union Catalog accommodates this diversity while encouraging and promoting the use of national and international cataloging standards. It allows organizations to locally maintain records customized to their own constituents and requirements, while providing consistent, homogenous displays to all users through MIC.
The MIC Core Registry
All of this is possible because MIC utilizes a
Core Registry
of data elements common to moving images from any type of organization. Records can be imported in any of several standard formats, or an archive's own local format. They are then mapped to the MIC Core Registry, where they can be exported out in the local or any of the standard formats.
Currently, the MIC Union Catalog imports and exports catalog records to and from
MARC
and
MPEG-7
(Multimedia Content Description Interface).
Dublin Core
mapping will be added shortly.
MODS (Metadata Object Description Schema) will be added in the Phase 2 development (2005-6).
You can view catalog records in MIC, MIC XML, MARC
HTML, MPEG-7 XML, Dublin Core XML, and in the organization’s original format.
From the Archivists Portal, find a record using a Collections Explore search.
Go into the full record and choose one of the display options at the bottom
of the page. We welcome your comments and questions; please let us know what you think.
The
core registry of data elements is designed to serve several purposes:
- Provide complete information about a moving image from any organization, using any cataloging schema
- Provide comparable and consistent information about a moving image from any organization, using any cataloging schema
- Provide sufficient information to allow users of any type to meet their core information needs, as defined in the
IFLA report Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records:
- Find: to find moving images that correspond to the user’s stated search criteria
- Identify: to confirm that the moving image described corresponds to the one sought, or to distinguish between two or more moving images with similar characteristics
- Select: to select a moving image that is appropriate to the user’s needs (i.e. to choose a moving image that meets the user's requirements with respect to content, physical format, etc., or to reject a moving image as being inappropriate to the user's needs)
- Obtain: to acquire or obtain access to the moving image described, through purchase, loan, onsite viewing, or electronically via immediate download or streaming
- Allow MIC Catalog records to be contextualized for specific MIC portals, which serve multiple purposes:
- Customization: MIC portals provide searches, displays, and informational resources that are customized for specific audiences. Information about moving images and moving image organizations will be more technical and specialized on archivists' portals, for example. The
NSDL portal, Science Goes to the Movies, includes only science-themed moving image catalog records and information useful for science educators.
- Research and Collaboration: MIC portals will allow communities to explore access strategies specific to organization type (e.g., broadcast news archives), audience (e.g., science educators) or physical format (e.g., digital video).
MPEG-7 is a cataloging standard that provides textual information for indexing (title, subject, creator, etc.) but also supports nontextual indexing, such as speech recognition, facial recognition, color matching, scene change analysis, sound and melody recognition, etc. MIC plans to use MPEG-7 in a future digital video portal that will allow users to focus their searches exclusively on digital video and that will enable the moving image archives community to explore advanced access strategies for digital video.
- Customization: MIC portals provide searches, displays, and informational resources that are customized for specific audiences. Information about moving images and moving image organizations will be more technical and specialized on archivists' portals, for example. The
Diagram one illustrates the current draft Union Catalog core registry database design, by MIC database architect, Yang Yu.
Diagrams two and three illustrate the catalog schema mapping functionality and the contextual information support that the Union Catalog provides.
Who contributes records to the MIC catalog?
As of October 2006, records from 14 alpha implementer sites have been loaded and are available for searching:
Current contributors include:
Academic Film Archive of North America
Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies
Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division (MBRS)
National Geographic Television and Film Library
Oregon Health & Science University
Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection (University of Georgia Libraries)
Several organizations provide access to digital video files, including the Library of Congress MBRS, National Geographic Television and Film Library, National Library of Medicine and ResearchChannel. As of November 2005, you are able to limit your search to digital video files.
The MIC Mapping Utility
With programming provided by Rutgers University Libraries, MIC has created a mapping utility enabling any moving image archive, regardless of metadata schema used, to share records globally through the MIC Union Catalog. The organization submits an application, sample records and field list, then MIC populates an online form with this data so that the organization can name MIC data element equivalents for its own fields. Still in the testing stages, the utility will allow small under-supported archives with very little metadata expertise to share their records with a much broader audience, while enabling large archives to integrate multiple metadata schema into a single system. This initiative exemplifies MIC's commitment to providing help with tools and standards to under-supported archives, while building consensus and shared solutions for broader constituencies.
In the fall of 2004, we began registering archives to participate in the MIC Union Catalog using the mapping utility. Alpha test sites for the mapping utility include:
Academic Film Archive of North America
Prelinger Collection at the Internet Archive
Academy Film Archive, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
National Geographic Television and Film Library
If you would like to contribute your organization’s records to the MIC Union Catalog, please contact MIC Project Manager Jane D. Johnson.