Abstract not found

Future users of digital objects will likely have numerous tools for discovering preserved digital objects relevant to their interests, but making meaningful use and sense of the digital objects will also require contextual information. This paper provides an analysis of context, distinguishing three main ways in which that term has been used within the scholarly literature. I then discuss contextual information within digital collections. I present a framework for contextual information that is based on nine classes of contextual entities: object, agent, occurrence, purpose, time, place, form of expression, concept/abstraction, and relationship. The paper then discusses existing standards and guidance documents for encoding information related to the nine classes of contextual entities, and it concludes with a discussion of potential implications for descriptive practices through the lifecycle of digital objects. “Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan. ”- Eliel Saarinen (The Maturing Modern, 1956) “…if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion. ”- Douglas Adams (1980) 1.

www.oclc.org ISBN: 1-55653-408-6 (978-1-55653-408-9) OCLC (WorldCat): 298733494 Please direct correspondence to: