Summary of standards and guidelines considered

We researched several standards and guidelines, focusing initially on film and video, and looking primarily at each recommendation for core metadata fields. Full analysis and notes comparing the different standards and guidelines can be found in the AV_Standards_Comparison_and_Organisationcontact document.

Some of the standards that might be considered too old (International Association of Sound and Audiovisual (IASA) – 1999 and Archival Moving Image Materials (AMIA) – 2001) were still being referenced and highlighted as potential sources by more modern guidelines such as International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) in 2017. IASA will be useful when we create guidelines for sound. In the approximately 20 years since these standards were released, there does not appear to be any major changes in the ‘key’ or ‘core’ elements in more recent guidelines, these are : Title, series/serial, cast, credits, production company, country of reference, original format, original length, original duration, original language, year of reference, identifier, genre, relationship and source.

The stand out candidate was the FIAF cataloguing manual, with its more recent incarnation incorporating the two-part standard - European Standards Committee (CEN) Cinematographic Works Standard (CWS) (EN 15744) and (EN 15907) and covering many elements from the Screen Heritage UK cataloguing guidelines.

A sentiment shared by all the standards and guidelines was that “The depth of audiovisual cataloguing is dependent on the library [or institution] in type, services and resources. Notwithstanding, a meaningful intellectual and technical description of the work must be captured in the catalogue record” (IFLA 2017).

Every organisation and institution has its own ideas, standards and systems for capturing and storing cataloguing metadata. There is no single correct way to catalogue sound as it is dependent on a number of factors...The decision on how to catalogue it will depend partly on the setup and structure of the database used but may also be influenced by a number of other factors, including: resources available – both financial and personnel; the priorities and aims of the cataloguing institution; the information retrieval requirements of the institution and its users, and more ((UOSH BL_01-21 Handout 4)

This highlights the importance of making sure that whilst we use the guidelines and standards to inform our work, we should feel empowered to deviate/mix/edit and create a set of guidelines that are tailored to our unique situation at Wellcome.