Items with multiple digitizations

Items with multiple digitizations

Subitems represent a digitization of part of a real world object, such as a page of a book, or a scan of one side of a document. You will need to submit metadata for both the top level item (the document) and for each subitem that represents an individual page or image of that document, for example.

Please follow these guidelines when structuring metadata for items with multiple digitizations:

• Each subitem should be submitted in a separate row
• All subitems and the top level item should share the same unique item id
• For the parent item, set the filetype to sequence and leave the filespec empty
• The rows for subitems should specify a unique subitemid, meaning that it should not be repeated under the corresponding top level item
• The rows for subitems should also specify an orderid with an integer (1,2,3...) denoting the order of subitems within the top level item

Making Changes to Sequences

As your content on the Arts & Culture platform evolves, you may want to create sequences out of existing assets, move assets in between sequences, or create individual assets out assets that currently belong to a single sequence.

While these operations are supported, they need to be executed in a specific way so that the individual media items retain their unique id in the system, and to ensure that the metadata is correctly attributed to either the sequence as a whole or to the individual media assets.

Note: Assets being re-sequenced must have the same launch status - meaning you cannot combine launched and unlaunched assets into a new album. You must first un-approve (or approve) assets before combining them.

Creating a sequence from existing assets

If you originally uploaded content as individual assets that are part of the same real world item, you can create a sequence from these assets without having to delete and re-upload the items by updating your metadata spreadsheet with a new sequence which contains the existing items.

The itemid from the existing assets becomes the subitemid of the new sequence. You will also need to evaluate the metadata for each asset and likely move repeated metadata from the individual assets to the sequence level.

Existing Metadata Sheet with 2 individual assets

Metadata Sheet which creates a new album consisting of 2 sub-items:

Moving assets between sequences

If you need to move assets between sequences, for example if something has been recategorized, you can do this by editing your metadata sheet to move the subitem to a new album. Please ensure any metadata is updated to reflect the new grouping.

Existing Metadata Sheet with 2 albums:

New Metadata Sheet which moves 1 image from one sequence to another:

Removing assets from a sequence

You can also remove items from a sequence into standalone items. As with other operations changing sequences, the metadata should reflect the new configuration.

Please note that If you remove all items from a sequence, the sequence will be deleted from the system as we do not support empty sequences. This is the only case when removing content from a metadata sheet will cause it to be deleted. As such, ensure any metadata that is relevant is copied from the sequence into the new assets

Existing Metadata Sheet with an album with 3 items:

New Metadata Sheet which keeps the album, but removes an item:

New Metadata Sheet which removes all items and deletes the album: