Posted March 18, 2025 by L.P. Coladangelo, DS Catalog Project and Data Manager
One of the paramount goals articulated by the DS 2.0 redevelopment project envisioning a national union catalog for manuscripts held by North American institutions was the ability to uniquely and persistently identify these rare cultural objects. This was felt especially important to supplement and coordinate the ability to identify manuscripts beyond disparate institutional shelfmarks, numbers accumulated through previous censuses and cataloging efforts, and other indexes and systems for various specialized lists and purposes. Creating a national union catalog meant, in essence, creating a national union authority file of identifiers for manuscript objects.
These unique and persistent identifiers—DS IDs—would act as lean manuscript authority records: identifying manuscript objects that exist in the real world. All that a DS ID would and could do was to act as a simple digital representation of a manuscript’s existence. The innovation of the DS data model, then, relied on using Linked Open Data to connect descriptive and other metadata to this manuscript object record. This was accomplished by envisioning a conceptual data model which would function in tandem with its implementation workflows, leaving the manuscript authority record unchanged, but linked to revisable data about the manuscript’s whereabouts and its latest descriptive information.
In this way, the DS data model centers the DS ID / manuscript object and connects it to two other additional clusters of information: the manuscript description (or DS Record) and manuscript Holding(s). The DS Record is an enriched and transformed version of the structured data about a manuscript. This metadata originates from the DS member institution currently holding a manuscript object. The DS Record is periodically updated to reflect the most recent descriptive information available from a holding institution. Holdings represent administrative metadata and other key pieces of information to learn more detailed information about a manuscript and how to locate it physically. The DS data model was developed with the ability to track current holdings as well as previous holding information, should a manuscript’s location or ownership ever change.
This linked structure of different database records means that the DS data model does make a conceptual distinction between manuscript descriptions and the objects themselves. This was purposeful, so as not to make any specific assertions or claims other than its existence. Instead, the DS Record is essentially a (revisable) document linked to the manuscript object which makes statements about the manuscript it describes (which could change at any time). As scholarship learns more and our understanding of these rare objects changes, the DS ID remains a stable anchor to which to attach all of these new insights.
Additionally, while the DS data model was designed to link only one DS Record to a manuscript, if the DS Catalog project should ever more closely integrate or align with other Linked Open Data or Wikibase projects, the model would potentially allow many different (and potentially competing) descriptions to be linked to the same object simultaneously. Although that is not current aim of the project, it is possible to imagine a future where the DS Catalog can become a hub for manuscript scholarship and description, supporting not just one institutional description but connecting to multiple descriptions in various other catalogs and projects. In the meantime, by providing a single and streamlined authority file for North American manuscript objects, DS is laying the groundwork toward greater integration and collaboration. Discoverability and data reuse is greatly increased while allowing members to maintain their own independent data standards and practices as disparate collections can all be searched in one place.