This project tried to examine concepts and vocabulary needs of this specific domain of moviegoing as well as the schema, or relationship of these concepts. The ideal outcome of a project such as this would be a complete agreed-upon schema, with very generalized concepts by which all moviegoing scholars can begin their digital
projects, much like the Dublin Core. However when one considers that the Dublin Core has been a work in progress since 1994 (dublincore.org/about/history/), one cannot expect to define a field with a few Delphi rounds. I felt that success for this project would be if the majority of the scholars participating find some benefit to the sharing of ideas and the iterative process are able to look at the definitions they use with a broader perspective, and not just in terms of their own research. If the findings of this project can be used as a reference for moviegoing scholars who begin new projects, I would also feel that this project was very successful. Maria A. Velez- Serna, a PhD student at the University of Glasgow who has yet to build a digital project on her own, but is becoming more involved in this domain said:
I think the building of the core scheme has been very successful; I can look at your diagram now and it gives me an idea of the kind of data that I need to gather and how things are connected. I am going to start working in
organising my data tables into a more structured database soon and I will take this as a blueprint. I think the 'tags' part still needs some cleaning, and perhaps this would benefit most from input from more people, see if the tags we are using are understood and useful for scholars working on different topics too. The whole process has been a welcome opportunity to step back and try to understand what I mean when I use some words, and most of all it has given me some insight into the way that other scholars are working.
The group that ultimately participated in the project was very important in molding the results. Because there were international scholars as well as scholars from America, this project was able to uncover some regional/ national concerns that brought up some very interesting topics for discussion. I do wish that there had been even more variety in the research which was being done, such as scholars focused on current-day moviegoing, or moviegoing in China. However, for such a complex discussion, seven was a good number of people to start with.
While none of the scholars who are currently working on projects came back to say they wanted to change their schemas, they did seem very willing and interested in continuing to tweak the schema definitions in order to “fit” their scholarship and the scholarship of their peers into the schema. Almost every scholar who participated in the process reported that they found the iterative process very interesting, and thought that being forced to think about how other researchers were defining the field was an interesting and worthwhile exercise for them. It seems that a valuable contribution to the discipline to continue this exploration.
While I felt that this project was a great beginning to the development of a common set of terms and elements for scholars within the moviegoing field to work with, there are still many questions left unanswered beyond the “Open Issues” mentioned
previously.
Several scholars noted that while this schema is a great “core” to the field of
moviegoing, their specific research required additional fields and concepts that were not included in this study. The Dublin Core, which began in 1995 developed a set of 15 basic metadata elements used to describe many different types of physical
resources, has basic core of simplified sets of elements. Beginning in 2009 Dublin Core started to develop working groups, or "application profiles" which work to develop specialized schemas that help to address the needs of various sub- communities (http://dublincore.org/). For example, the Dublin Core Education
Schema takes the basic elements of the Dublin Core and adds other elements specific to an educational object, users, duration, learning process, etc. Similarly, this project focused on finding commonalities in order to narrow down the fields to a core set, which would ideally be applicable to all moviegoing projects. Opening up the process to even more moviegoing scholars could provide further refinement of this core set of fields. After this, it would be important to go back and establish working groups to address sub topics that might be relevant to numerous scholars, although perhaps not to the whole community.
Once a common set of definitions are in place and it becomes easier to share data between the various projects, issues of data authority arise. Hired undergraduates or students often fill in the majority of the content for these projects, and while the scholar(s) still has responsibility for the work, they may not review all of it. This noted, what types of citations are needed for these scholars to be able to make use of data prepared by someone unknown? Scholars are often comfortable sharing their data with each other, trusting in their peers to have done quality research. However sharing data with a larger group, when not all of the participants are known, may cause some of these scholars to be skeptical of the data. If this is the case, what types of authority controls will be needed to ensure that the data is still useful?
With the iterative Delphi process that these scholars went through, an effort has begun to define the field of moviegoing in a formalized sense. Hopefully as further collaboration and work between these scholars continues the open discussions will
continue, and these scholars will begin to develop a schema not just with their individual project in mind, but with the entire spectrum of moviegoing, taking into account temporal and cultural difference in terminology and research needs.