CDASH Schema: The Cambridge Architecture Survey In Omeka
The Cambridge Architectural Survey and History (CDASH) is system for exposing and enriching the Cambridge Architectural Survey -- a large, actively managed collection of documents occupying 10 file cabinets in the office of the Cambridge Historical Commission. As a physical filing system, the Survey is organized as (approximately) 40 file drawers with 4000 folders containing 120,000 pages of diverse documents including many photographs from the 19th century, and systematic building inventories, clippings and research data.
As a physical filing system, the Architectural Survey has many properties that lend themselves to the creation of a map-oriented digital archive. Every document has been labeled according to a street address of the subject. Each folder is labeled by street and address range. Some folders are also labeled with a thematic subject.
CDASH is the home for a digital mirror this Architectural History collection presented using a Omeka-S, a popular open source asset management and publishing platform. CDASH is a unique Omeka site in many ways. Especially that the documents are organized according to places that are presented on a map. The hierarchy of Folders, Places and Documents is useful. not only as an intuitive means of discovering documents and displaying them in the context of historic maps, the folder-place-document hierarchy also provides important associations among documents that are useful for refining and enriching the information about documents and places.
The CDASH Documentation Project is intended to provide an account of the tools that have been made for digitizing the collection and preparing it for importing into Omeka. The modifications and collection guidelines that have been applied to create and maintain the CDASH application.
Mapping of physical filing system to Omeka-S
When looking for asset management tools to be the home of the Digital Architecture Survey Omeka-S was chosen because it is open-source with a large community of users, and also because it had many collection design concepts corresponding with the pre-existing organization of the physical Architecture Survey.
Standard Omeka Data Organization
- Omeka Items represent Documents and their catalog information.
- Omeka Media represent the indiividual pages of documents.
- Omeka Item Sets represent groups of items -- perfect for representing the folders in the Architecture Survey.
- Omeka Geolocation any omeka item can be geolocated. Geolocated items have a marker that will show up on a map.
CDASH Item Classes
The Item and Item-set hierarchy provided by Omeka is good for represent folders and their associated documents. But the digitized Architecture Survey also groups item according to Places -- the most important way of grouping and discovering documents. To represent this relationship we created two distinct classes of Omeka Items: Places and Documents.
Item Types and Omeka Resource Templates
Resource templates are Omeka's means of providing for the definition of different types of Items. CDASH makes use of three resource templates to define Place Items, Document Items and Media.
CDASH Document Items
The most typical sort of an item in CDASH is a scanned document. After the scanning and sorting workflow described above, the image files related to a pages of specific document would be imported into Omeka as Media and linked to an Omeka item of type CDASH Document. The CDASH Document amounts to a collection of metadata properties, some of which have default values assigned depending on the document type and the name of the place that the document is associated with. Other optional metadata properties may be filled in later.
There are several types of documents in the CDASH collection, including Exterior or Interior Images, Architectural Inventory Forms, etc. The full list of Document Types and the other properties of Document Items is expanded in the Document Item Data Dictionary.
CDASH Place Items
To best represent the structure of the Building Files collection in Omeka, it was useful to create a second type of item, used to describe places. The most typical CDASH Place is a simple street address that was found on the tab of one of the folders, or written on a paper artifact from the Building Files. But CDASH Place items can also be used to represent specific Buildings, Monuments, Trees, etc. A more complete dictionary of Place types is provided in the CDASH Place Types
The Place Item template provides for many metadata properties to be filled in to record information about buildings and other designed places. Click here to visit the data dictionary for CDASH Place Items.
Creating and Editing Omeka Items
Detailed advice for Creating, Revising and Enriching CDASH Items has been moved to a new page.