The project will investigate the following questions, testing the relevant
hypotheses:
- Ethnographic research methodologies often include subjects re-visiting collected
data to see how it prompts even richer stories. It is an hypothesis of this
research that identified cultural resources can act as rich triggers for cultural
expression, often by people other than those who first identified them. This
entails a valuing of stories and interpretations by others who may have more
comprehensive or possibly, different stories to tell about the same resource.
- To what extent does the process of cataloguing resources make the conversion
from cultural knowledge to cultural capital more tractable and what are the
best ways to do this? The hypothesis is that an appropriate in-the-box solution
will enable the development of distributed and privately owned catalogues,
leading to better understanding and trust. In turn, this will lead to more,
higher-quality, aggregated catalogues that can combine public resources with
discovery services for the future. The model for this is the web where experience
suggests that participation builds familiarity and trust.
- It is asserted that Qualified DC is better than DC because it allows for
richer, deeper structured description of resources. Matchbox will be evaluated
as a ‘second-generation’, QDC system. Matchbox records will be downward
compatible and interoperable with standards-compliant DC records of existing
subject gateways, libraries and other Australian (and international) collections.
The value added by these enhancements will be investigated.
- Matchbox will not contain resources but rather the information that is necessary
to discover and retrieve resources. It is an hypothesis that multimedia descriptions
may, in some situations, be more valued than textual ones, especially for
retrieval. How the multimedia descriptions should be related to the resources
and records of them (either as part of the record or automatically associated
with it) is a related research question.
- The modestly-priced availability of Matchbox will enable many organisations
to create and share standards-compliant records of their resources or resources
of interest to them. This project will test a new version of distributed professional
development, implemented by Liddy Nevile in 1995-6. A peer support group will
be created by accompanying the distribution of the software by the development
of a web of users, supported by Motile.
Please note the annotated version of this
set of questions and links to ongoing research within the project.
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