Lab 5

This week’s lab consisted of exploring the Dublin Core metadata fields on the Omeka platform and comparing those to the Mukurtu platform metadata fields. The Mukurtu platform organized the metadata fields into major categories such as Essentials, Core, Rights and Permissions, Additional Metadata, and Relations. Mukurtu matched Dublin’s Core fields; however, there were many more specific fields that included: Communities and Cultural Protocols where each digital heritage item had to belong to at least one community; Item Sharing Settings for the Cultural Protocols; Categories which were high-level descriptive terms for Digital Heritage items; Cultural Narratives and Traditional Knowledge that are community specific; Keywords to make items more discoverable; Traditional Knowledge Labels that are non-legal, social and educational tags for indigenous communities; Licensing Options that specify how a work may be used; Community Records and Book Pages that allow multiple media assets to be presented within a specific Digital Heritage item as well as more specific metadata such as People, Transcription, Geocode Address, Latitude, Longitude, and Location Description. I can clearly see how Mukurtu caters to specific cultural communities with these additional metadata fields.

I believe that the Mukurtu platform assumes it users will have an abundance of very specific and unique cultural, social, and indigenous Digital Heritage items that some users may want to protect from public manipulation but may be shared within a specific community (which would explain the Communities and Cultural Protocols field). On the other hand, Omeka assumes that the Digital Heritage items will be accessed and shared by the public at large, which explains the more general and broad metadata fields.