Contributor Types

[ajpatterson]

Moved from ​http://www.ome-xml.org/ticket/84

a.You might consider changing Experimenter to something more general, like Person. Experimenters are not the only people who may contribute to a file, so the name can be misleading. My suggestion is to make the roles they play clear at the applicable part of the schema in naming the elements that take the ExperimenterRef?. If changing the actual word Experimenter is a nightmare not worth living, at least provide documentation explaining that the term may be used for any involved person.

2. Role—role of the contributor
   
   1. Data Acquirer
      
      1. This is what is generally already specified.
         
   2. File Creator (see related in Creation Dates)
      
      1. Note that OME allows multiple images per file and files derived from other files. That means that the file creator could be the same as the data acquirer, just one of many data acquirers, or not a data acquirer at all, but merely someone compiling data.
         
   3. Metadata Contributor
      
      1. Other folks may contribute to annotating images. In some cases, these annotations may make up the main value of the dataset, and that contribution should be recorded.
         
   4. Other collaborators?
      
      1. Some way needed to give credit to responsible persons (PIs) if the data acquirer is a lowly lab tech, for example? What to call this, and can you think of any other type of roll?
         
   5. Rights Holder/Distributor/Maintainer?
      
      1. These may be institutions or people; is that a problem?
         
3. Funders
   
   1. Generally will be institutions.
      
   2. Entering this data doesn’t need to be mandatory, but some people might appreciate a place to credit/disclose funders, and it may be required by repositories later. I am not aware of any that require this right now for datasets only, but most require it for article publication, and it is certainly getting more attention than it used to. We expect this to apply to datasets, too, as dataset publication becomes more common.

[mlinkert]

Comment from Jason Palmer (library science student at LOCI):

METS also allows a slew of different people to be included in the XML
document, including:

CREATOR: The person(s) or institution(s) responsible for the METS document.
EDITOR: The person(s) or institution(s) that prepares the metadata for encoding.
ARCHIVIST: The person(s) or institution(s) responsible for the document/collection.
PRESERVATION: The person(s) or institution(s) responsible for preservation functions.
DISSEMINATOR: The person(s) or institution(s) responsible for dissemination functions.
CUSTODIAN: The person(s) or institution(s) charged with the oversight of a document/collection.
IPOWNER: Intellectual Property Owner: The person(s) or institution holding copyright, trade or service marks
 or other intellectual property rights for the object.
OTHER: Use OTHER if none of the preceding values pertains and clarify the type and location specifier being
 used in the OTHERROLE attribute (see below).

See METS schema: ​http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/