Page 130 - Building Digital Libraries

Metadata Formats 6

When digital library platforms first started emerging, users had few IN THIS CHAPTER
options when it came to metadata frameworks for their bibliographic
description. Systems tended to support a single descriptive schema like  Metadata Primitives
Unqualified Dublin Core or the system’s own closed internal metadata  Summary
schema. This meant that one of the first and most important decisions that
a digital repository implementer would need to make was the selection of
a bibliographic data model and metadata schema that would be sufficient
for use in describing the various materials that might be eventually loaded
into the digital repository system. And once selected, all metadata decisions
would be left to the digital repository platform, giving the implementer few
options for customization or expansion. While this approach would lead to
a universal descriptive format on the digital repository platform (in many
respects, emulating the ubiquity of MARC in integrated library systems),
its net effect was to create metadata that was in many cases tied too closely
to a specific software product, or was too broad to be meaningful outside
of a particular system.
Today, digital repository software has become much more flexible in
terms of how metadata is shared and created. This allows implementers to
store bibliographic data using one of many current metadata schemas, and
to create metadata storehouses that are heterogeneous in nature and which
can interoperate with a greater variety of systems. This flexibility allows
organizations to take a much closer look at how they describe different
types of materials, as well as control the granularity of description for each
item appearing in the digital repository. While this chapter will not provide
a comprehensive guide for any one metadata schema, it examines a hand-
ful of metadata schemas that are currently being used by digital repository
implementers, looking at how and when specific schemas may be utilized.

115