Messages and Metadata
We’ve already received some messages from users who have information to share about a photograph or other item they found on Michigan Memories. Thank you! When we receive a message like that, we pass it along to the institution that shared the item with us. Explaining why we do that is a good opportunity to talk about what Michigan Memories is and what it does.
Everything you find on Michigan Memories is shared by libraries, archives, historical societies, and museums from all around Michigan. Taking care of our cultural heritage and making sure you can access it are some of the most important work they perform, year-after-year, decade-after-decade. As the dedicated curators of these original items, the responsibility for revising or updating their descriptions properly belongs with them. And as librarians, archivists, or curators will tell you, improving descriptions is an ongoing and never-ending process!
You may have noticed that when you search a topic on Michigan Memories, you get a page of results with descriptions of items, usually including thumbnail images. But if you select “View Full Item,” that link takes you to the institution where the original item is held. Michigan Memories isn’t the home of these items; institutions share their “metadata” abut them so you can search their descriptions.
“Metadata” is a complicated subject, but one definition of the word is “data about data.” In other words, metadata are (the word is actually plural) a set of words and numbers that describe a particular thing.
So when you use Michigan Memories you’re searching descriptions of material–the metadata– rather than copies of the items themselves. The actual items remain on the websites of the institutions that share their descriptions with us. This way, we can:
- Respect any copyright protections pertaining to those records
- Provide access to records no matter what form they take. Videos, innovative works of digital art, complex visualizations–we don’t have to worry about supporting complicated types of digital records because we are just pointing to them on other websites.
- Encourage Michigan Memories users to visit the websites of these cultural institutions, giving them the benefit of more web traffic and giving our users the chance to explore those sites and maybe find other interesting things.
One way to think of Michigan Memories is as a “pipeline” from these institutions and their websites to you. So when you share information with us, we pass it back through the pipeline to them so they can decide what to do. When an institution updates a description, that change will appear on Michigan Memories soon after.
As we mentioned above, updating records is an ongoing effort for any cultural institution. Library catalog systems are complicated computer programs, and sometimes making a “simple” change can be more complex than it might appear! So it may take some time for a change to happen, and the institution might have reasons for leaving the item's description the way it is. But we will pass your information along when we get it, and we always appreciate it.