A catalogue is an essential part of organizing digital assets. A catalogue takes all of the many parts of publishing: ideas, assets, documents, authors, etc., and puts them all in their correct places. A catalogue helps us put our work in its proper context.
Think of a graph. On one axis, we plot all of the ideas we communicate about in our human rights work. On another axis, we plot all of the different kinds of communications products we produce. On the third axis, we plot time. This is how the CCK catalogue works: we organize and encode include all of our publishing work, each and every story classified, filed, and, most imprortantly, related to one another. By catalogueing our stories we make them searchable, dynamic, and relevant.
We use a metadata system based on the HURIDOCS Standard Format Micro-Thesauri to classify human rights ideas and relate ideas to documents. This system uses a "violations" model and unique numerical identifier to classify human rights issues.
The purpose adopting of this system is to create a standardized, open, and complete vocabulary for classifying human rights violations, thereby increaing access to information and exposure of human rights issues.
What is a controlled vocabulary?
- A way to describe a set of ideas in a predictable way
- A specific collecion of words and relationships between words
- A way to understand the contents of documents systmaticly
What does a controlled vocabulary do?
- Provides a hierarchical list of words to use to describe a document: ie, to create metadata
- Metadata is used to identify and group content into meaningful collections. These collections can be non-exclusive, a documenta can exist i n more than one collection at a time
- Over time, and in conjunction with other tools for digital asset management, controlled vocabulary keeps a library of content serachable and useful, even when it grows to be very large and complicated
How do we use a controlled vocabulary?
- First, we choose a list of words specific to the kind of content we are creating and broad-enough to describe most (if not all) of the content we want to include in our library
- Then, content creators and editors choose words from the list to describe the documetns the produce. These words are attached to the document - the process can be manual or computer assisted, but a human who undrestand the content has the important role of identifying its semantic meaning
- The documents are published and held in our catalogue, which is able to search and group items by the information in the metadata, the information attached by the creators
A controled vocabulary isn't the only kind of metadata that is important - there is also information about the kinds of documents we produce (their length, for example), or the programs that spur their creation, or the community the document is meant to serve. But semantic metadata applied through a controlled vocabulary is the most important kind of metadata for understanding the meaning of a document.