Digital information held by libraries, museums and archives is typically isolated in individual repositories making cross-repository searching difficult, if not impossible. Users of digital resources including humanities scholars, however, often search for information or resources pertinent to their field of endeavor irrespective of where the data is held. The establishment of collection description registries, such as Research Data Australia, goes someway towards solving this problem by aggregating descriptions of datasets held by individual repositories in a structured and coherent manner to promote the reuse of data.

In the Bamboo Technology Project environment, there is a need for data to be discoverable for computer-mediated use and reuse across collections. This requires that collection descriptions include machine actionable descriptions of collection services, as well as human readable descriptions of data holdings.

Describing Collections and Collection Services for the BTP suggests that a greater use of semantic web technologies, including RDF encoding for Registry Interchange Format – Collection and Services (RIF-CS), would simplify computer mediated use and reuse of data, particularly the automatic linking of services and data. Given the centrality of both collection interoperability, as well as data use and reuse to the Bamboo Technology Project, the adoption of an RDF encoding of an established schema such as RIF-CS for data collections would greatly aid the process of discovery as applied to both data and services.

editor’s note: Describing Collections and Collection Services for the BTP, authored by Timothy W. Cole (University of Illinois), Myung-Ja Han (University of Illinois), Doug Moncur (The Australian National University), and Harriett E. Green (University of Illinois), was presented by MJ Han and Doug Moncur at the recent DCMI International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, The Hague, September 22, 2011.