DASE Germanic Studies Database

UT-Austin's Liberal Arts Digital Archive SErvices (DASE) offers a place for the department of German to store images taken from various textbooks to be accessed by anyone with a UT EID. When you click on the Germanic Studies button, you are directed to a page that shows all of the attributes that apparently serve as metadata and how many records are in each category. A sidebar allows students to build their own virtual collections and their own slideshows.


While this seems like a good thing in theory, the front end of the operation, and perhaps the back end too, leaves quite a lot to be desired.

(1) It's really slow to load images.

(2) 'my cart'? Need I say more? Are we selling something here? It just seems to me like a tacky gimmick.

(3) Metadata are sparse at best. The categories listed are Legend, Dase Rights Level, Category, City, Country, Date, Filename, Media Type, Name, Series, and Source.

(4) Metadata are sometimes entered in German, sometimes in English or French, and are not at all consistent.

(5) The metadata record principally the objects seen in the illustrations and have no way of recording the type of digital object; e.g. jpg from a printed book.

(6) There is no way to determine when a particular photograph was actually taken so we do not know what is really represented in it (Let's say it's a pre-war photograph of a medieval cathedral taken from a book printed in 1978; the photograph may or may not be representative of the cathedral today, but we have no way of knowing.)

(7) Captions to photographs in books depend very much upon their context within the work for meaning. I hadn't really realised how important that was in modern books before last night. Captions without context are at best vague, and at worst misleading.

(8) While each of the categories can be searched and sorted, if you click on St Gallen under city you find a photograph of the Stiftsbibliothek, but not the two versions of the Abbey Plan (9th century) which I located last night searching by date. And the two photographs of these two plans were not right next to each other but separated by several other digital objects.

(9) Categories are so vague that they are less than helpful. This is not a big problem for small collections of digital objects, but once you have to start scrolling (or even worse going from page to page) it becomes hopeless.

I could go on and on with my quiggles on this one, but I'll spare you for now. I will be interested to see how the proposed record album cover database is arranged on the metadata and navigational fronts.