No Little Plans: Constructing a Local Controlled Vocabulary in EXPLORE Chicago Collections

The Chicago Collections Consortium (CCC), formed in 2012, is a membership organization of libraries, archives, and museums in the Chicago area, whose mission is to collect, preserve, and share freely, openly, and equitably the history and culture of Chicago with the world. One of the ways it supports this mission is through the EXPLORE Chicago Collections (EXPLORE) portal, which brings together the finding aids for archival collections as well as individual digital images from its member organizations into a single online discovery platform. Aggregating digital content from various repositories that utilize different metadata schemas and descriptive standards is notoriously difficult. One way that the Chicago Collections Consortium attempts to streamline the content in EXPLORE is with the creation of a local, regional vocabulary that creates uniformity in access points across the records.