Page 101 - Building Digital Libraries

CHAPTER 5

like MS Word or PDF be accessible into the future? Past
experience tells us that they will not. Current versions of
Adobe’s PDF reader are not always compatible with its earli-
est formats, while MS Word struggles to open documents
from much earlier versions. The difficulty with all binary
documents is that their data formats will become stale and
support for these older formats will disappear, “losing”
the data. Open data formats like XML ensure that a docu-
ment’s data is always accessible—even if only through visual
inspection—preserving long-term access to information.

The benefits of an open data structure cannot be overstated—particularly for
an organization that may wish to customize or extend its digital repository
software. The ability to read and understand the native metadata provides an
invaluable tool for software and web developers, in addition to preventing
data from being locked or lost in unsupported binary formats.

XML Offers a Quicker Cataloging Strategy

While not everyone may consider this to be a benefit of many XML-based
schemas, in many cases, XML-based metadata schemas will lower many of
the barriers that organizations currently face when creating bibliographic
metadata. One of the reasons why it lowers barriers is the separation of
administrative, structural, and bibliographic metadata. Administrative
metadata would include the technical information about the digital object
being loaded into one’s digital repository, while structural metadata stores
a record of all digital objects, including metadata, that make up the “whole”
record for the item. One of the benefits of many XML-based metadata sche-
mas is that a number of specialized schemas exist for storing administrative
metadata, separating this information from the descriptive metadata. Since
many systems like DSpace and Fedora automatically generate administrative
metadata for each object loaded into the repository system, the individual
submitting material into a repository is only responsible for the actual
description of their object. Moreover, unlike MARC, which is governed by
RDA (Resource Description and Access), many XML-based systems provide
few, if any descriptive rules that will allow organizations to create custom
metadata schemas and data dictionaries to best suit the metadata needs
for a particular project. For example, at Oregon State University, the data
dictionaries are used to define how Dublin Core elements for a particular
project are to be defined and interpreted. So the following might be utilized
as a data dictionary for a project:

86