Essential Strategies, Inc


Superior Information Architecture





Digital Public Library of America
A project to create an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that would
draw on the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities, archives, and museums
in order to educate, inform and empower everyone in the current and future generations.

-- DPLA Steering Committee
October, 2010

The Beta Sprint seeks
  • Ideas, models, prototypes, technical tools, user interfaces, etc.—
  • Put forth as a written statement, a visual display, code, or a combination of forms—
  • That demonstrate how the DPLA might index and provide access to a wide range of broadly distributed content.
The Beta Sprint also encourages development of betas that suggest alternative designs or that focus on particular parts of the system, rather than on the DPLA as a whole.

Essential Strategies Submission
Essential Strategies proposes to make use of the enterprise conceptual data models contained in David C. Hay's book, Enterprise Model Patterns: Describing the World, to create conceptual data models to support the DPLA's efforts to automate a digital public library. The models fall into two categories:
  • A model of Information Resource, the artifacts managed by a typical library.
  • A model of "the world" that provides a basis for organizing the concepts described by or referred to by each Information Resource.
The submission is in the form of four recorded presentations that will be found here:
    Part One: Technology and Modeling -- A Discussion of the ramifications of technological change and the inherent problems with developing technology effectively. In particular, the role data modeling can play in producing simpler and more robust systems is described, along with an overview of Essential Strategies, Inc.'s proposed assistance. {38:37}

    Part Two: Information Resource -- Presentation of the conceptual data model of the information resources that are a library's inventory. Resource specifications and instances, their relationships to language and concepts, and distribution and disposal of information resource instances. {27:04}

    Part Three: People and Organization -- Presentation of a portion of the conceptual data model that describes the world as a whole. This one is about people and organizations. Collectively, they are known as "Parties", and the model shows how they are related to each other, how they are named and identified, and how they are described.
    The presentation concludes with the detailed services offered to the DPLA Beta Sprint project. {42:38}

    Part Four: Origami and Data Modeling -- A brief story about what origami can teach us about data modeling. {2:18}