Carol Butler (Smithsonian
Institution), Neil Thomson (the Natural History Museum,London)
and Roger Hyam (Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh)
Collection
descriptions are electronic records that document the holdings
of an organization as groups of items and complement the more
traditional item-level records such as are produced for a single
specimen or a library book. The NCD Interest Group has developed
a data standard, called Natural Collections Description (NCD)
for describing entire collections of natural history materials;
one NCD record describes one entire collection, including information
about the collection, access and usage of the collection and where
to get more detailed information. NCD brings together work on
collections descriptions being carried out for the European Union
Framework VI program SYNTHESYS with the work performed by RAVNS
under the auspices of RLG Programs.
A brief
descriptive record as defined by the NCD standard can act as the
"business card" for a collection, providing enough information
to identify and locate it. The standard enables the aggregation
of collections descriptions from many sources and facilitates
resource discovery. Another discovery use is that relationships
among collections in several locations can be established using
NCD records.
NCD
is a lightweight resource description standard specific to natural
history collections, such as specimens, original artwork, archives,
observations, library materials, datasets, photographs or mixed
collections such as those that result from expeditions and voyages
of discovery. NCD primarily holds information about collections
of objects, but can also be used to describe organizations (collections
of collections) and networks (collections of organizations). NCD
is between general resource discovery standards such as Dublin
Core (DC) and rich collection description standards such as the
Encoded Archival Description (EAD). It will be possible to extract
a Dublin Core record from an NCD record for use with general resource
discovery systems. It is also possible to use an NCD record as
the seed for a richer collection description, like EAD.
