About this section
This section is broadly in two parts.
In this first part you will find a tab by tab and field by field description of the Narratives module. If one of your objectives is to deploy your narratives on the web, this section is particularly useful for identifying and understanding which fields need to be completed and with what.
The second part touches on a number of areas in which the Narratives module can be used. However its primary objective is to assist institutions to implement the Narratives module as a content management tool for a website.
Note: Although the Narratives module documented here uses a Cultural History collection, the theory and techniques described apply to any type of collection.
It is assumed that readers are at least familiar with creating new records, searching for records, and attaching records.
Narratives are designed to capture and publish the knowledge of your experts, and provide a way of presenting a Museum's collection within a cultural, historical or scientific context. EMu's Narratives module helps structure these stories for different types of publication, including delivery to the web. It stores historically significant, general or even ephemeral information gathered about the collections. In short, the Narratives module is designed to hold any interpretative information about a collection, as well as references to all of the resources (EMu and non-EMu) used to author it.
Examples of narratives records are:
- Labels for exhibits.
- Textual descriptions for brochures and programs.
- Miscellaneous internal information management, e.g. a record of conversations held or correspondence sent and received.
The key feature of the Narratives module is its flexibility.
Narratives are ideal for use in web based presentations of a collection.
A Narratives record includes:
- Title, authors
- The text of the narrative (plain text or formatted text)
- Type, purpose and intended audience
- Subjects and keywords of the narrative
- Interview details
- Correspondence details
- Related publications and documentation
- Verification and authori
Narratives module and the Dublin Core metadata standard
The Narratives module is broadly compliant with the Dublin Core Metadata standard, which ensures that content is discoverable and extensible for Open Archives Initiatives, and other Dublin Core uses:
- Compliance can be managed by setting some core fields to mandatory.
- Consistency can be managed with controlled vocabularies (fields controlled by Lookup Lists or the Thesaurus module, for instance).
Examples of Narratives records
The following diagram illustrates Narratives records commonly attached to different modules:
