Collection PrinciplesArchNet is an exciting project being developed at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning with the full support of The Aga Khan Trust for Culture, an agency of the Aga Khan Development Network. The Aga Khan Trust for Culture is a private, non-denominational, international development agency with programmes dedicated to the improvement of built environments in societies where Muslims have a significant presence. The goal of ArchNet is to create a community of architects, planners, educators, and students. The community can help each other by sharing expertise, local experience, resources, and dialogue. Members are urged to take on a pro-active role in the community. Imagine the wealth of knowledge and history created in the various schools of architecture around the world. ArchNet hopes to tap that knowledge and provide a mechanism by which these valuable tools can be disseminated. The ArchNet Digital Library is part of ArchNet website containing the documents, images and other documents collected.
Metadata
The metadata has been well designed and employed. Since this collection developed for architecture, such metadata are set to be variant name, street address, location, date, style/period, century, building type, building usage and keywords. Also, the image for each building goes with notes as a short history and description. ArchNet also has publications and other documents with metadata encompassing citation, author/editor, book title, publication date, copyright, language, document type, keywords, file type and size as well as description. It also allows users to download the files from this site. You can search by clicking through the subject terms under book title and keywords fields. There are portfolios from the contributors in this association with metadata like author/creator, year, file type, format, copyright, source, file size, and description. They are also downloadable. The references resources are given within this digital library and another gallery view is available for users to browse all the images.
Object Characteristics
A navigation bar seems to be adopted by every exhibition I found and always on the left side of the screen. Under the Digital Library tab, there are five sub-categories under these section- images, publications, portfolio, reference and gallery. Starting from the images, I got a full index in this section. All the words in the index have been sorted alphabetically and you can view the content by collection, country, building type, building style, building usage, century, decade and site name. Publications have been sorted under special collections, document type, language, author name, title and articles related to building type or country and keywords. In a word, the entire index is based on the metadata created for this collection. Other sub-titles followed the similar way of exhibiting their content.
Members can contribute by adding their individual image collections and files in their personal workspace. They can add events to the Digital Calander, post a topic or a response in the Discussion Forum, create a Group Workspace with other members from around the globe, work with their institution to create an Institution Workspace to make student work and faculty research available to the larger community, and add to the academic directory or link to web resources in the Reference Section of the Digital Library.
Intended Audience
ArchNet set its goal to become an international online community for architects, planners, urban designers, landscape architects, conservationists, and scholars, with a focus on Muslim cultures and civilizations. The objective of ArchNet is to create a community of architects, planners, educators, and students. The community can help each other by sharing expertise, local experience, resources, and dialogue.
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