Contemplating Photography

Metadata-

- Metadata is structured information associated with an object.

- Different types of metadata can be added by different people at various stages of an information object’s life cycle.

- 3 basic kinds of metadata

- Descriptive metadata – helps users find objects and understand the subject or contents of objects.

- Administrative metadata – helps collection managers keep track of objects

- Structural metadata – documents relationship among objects

- creating broadly accessible descriptive metadata is a way to maximize access by current users and attract new user communities

- use of a standardized subject thesaurus provides greater precision in searching for end users and enables future functionality

- The approach to metadata standards must be made within the context of the organization’s pupose for digitizing the collection (users and intended usage, approaches adopted within the community, and the desired level of access)

Questions:

- Purpose of digital collection

- User needs and intended usage

- metadata standard selection and usage

Metadata Principle 2

-good metadata supports interoperability

- goal of interoperability: help users find and access information objects that are distributed across domains and institutions

- use of standard metadata schemes facilitates interoperability by allowing records to be exchanged and shared by systems that support the scheme

- another way is to map elements fromone scheme to those of another scheme – crosswalks

- helps users of one scheme to understand another

- allow records created according to one scheme to be coverted by program to another

for example: if a local metadata scheme is in use instead of a standard scheme, a crosswalk to some standard scheme should be develped for furture interoperability

- open archives initiative – harvestin protocol

- “metasearch” – cross-system searching – metadata remains in the source repository, but local search system accepts queries from remote search systems

3. Good metadata uses authority control and content standards such as controlled vocab

- consider vocabularies/knowledge of users

- whatever vocabularies are chosen, their use should be documented and guidelines provided to help metadata creators select terms consistently

Getty Vocabulary Program – thesauri for the visual arts

4. Good Metadata includes a clear statement on the conditions and terms of use for the digital object

5. Good Metadata supports the long-term management of objects in collections

- administration metadata: facilitate the management of resources

- preservation metadata: administration metadata simed at supporting the long-term retention of digital objects – needs to be compatible with worksflow – digital objects descriptions

- structural metadata relates the pieces of a compound object together

6. Good metadata records are objects themselves and should have the qualities of good objects

- “Meta-metadata” – stored info about metadata, should include the id of the institution that created it and what standards were used