Development of a conceptual graphical user interface framework for the creation of XML metadata for digital archives
Crispen Mugabe · DuEPublico (University of Duisburg-Essen) · 2013
This dissertation is motivated by the DFG sponsored Jonas Cohn Archive digitization project at Steinheim-Institut whose aim was to preserve and provide digital access to structured handwritten historical archive material highlighting New Kantian philosophy scattered in the correspondence, diaries and private journals kept by and written to and by Jonas Cohn. The dissertation describes a framework for processing and presenting multi-standard digital archive material. A set of standard markup schema and semantic bibliographic descriptions have been chosen to illustrate the multiple standard and hence semantic heterogeneous digital archiving process. The standards include Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) and Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS). The chosen standards best illustrate the structural contrast between the systematic archive, digitized archive and digitized text standards. Furthermore, combined digital preservation and presentation approaches offer not only the digitized texts but also metadata structured variably sized images of the archive documents enabling virtual visualization. State of the art applications focus solely on either one of the structural areas neglecting the compound idea of a virtual digital archive. The content of this work describes the requirements analysis for managing multi-structured and therefore multi-standard digital archival artefacts in textual and image form. In addition to the architecture and design, an infrastructure suitable for processing, managing and presenting such scholarly archives is sought for recognition as a digital framework useful for the preservation and access to digitized cultural resources. The proposed solution therefore includes the instrumentation of a conglomerate of existing and novel XML technology for transformations based in a centralized application. The archive can then be managed via a client-server application thereby focusing archival activities on structured data collection and information preservation illustrated in the dissertation process by the: • Development of a prototype data model allowing the integration of the relevant markup schema • Implementation of a prototype client server application handling archive processing, management and presentation and based on the data model already mentioned • Development and implementation of a role archive access user interface Furthermore as an infrastructural development serving expert archivists from the humanities, the dissertation explores methods of binding the existing XML metadata creation process to other programming languages. In doing so, one opens further for channels simplifying the metadata creation process by integrating the use of graphical user interfaces. To this end the java programming language, its swing and AWT graphical user interface libraries, associated relational persistency and enterprise client server architecture resemble a suitable environment for integrating XML metadata into main stream computing. Hence the implementation of Java XML Data Binding as part of the metadata creation framework is part and parcel of the proposed solution.