Metadata & Related Standards

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Metadata, literally "data about data," is an increasingly ubiquitous term that is understood in different ways by the diverse professional communities that design, create, describe, preserve, and use information systems and resources.

Introduction to Metadata: pathways to digital information online edition, version 2.1

This page is intended to provide links to information about various metadata formats and to information about software designed to work with structured text. These are not an exhaustive lists, but rather a place to start your exploration.

Intrductions to metadata

Introduction to Metadata: pathways to digital information: http://www.getty.edu/research/institute/standards/intrometadata/

Includes articles on metadata, a section on acronyms, and a section on crosswalks.

Princeton University Library Digital Collections: http://diglib.princeton.edu/?_xq=html&_xsl=metadata.xsl

Definition and introduction to community metadata and related standards.

Metadata Standards of interest to Archivists

DC -- Darwin Core: http://darwincore.calacademy.org/

The Darwin Core 2 is a simple set of data element definitions designed to support the sharing and integration of primary biodiversity data.

DC (or DCMI) -- Dublin Core Metadata Initiative: http://dublincore.org/

The Dublin Core is a metadata element set intended to facilitate discovery of electronic resources. Originally conceived for author-generated description of Web resources, it has attracted the attention of formal resource description communities such as museums, libraries, government agencies, and commercial organizations.

EAC -- Encoded Archival Context: http://www.library.yale.edu/eac/

International effort to deveop an SG/XML DTD for capuring the context in which records' creators operate, and the cirsumstances of record creation.

HTML meta -- meta tags: http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/meta.html

Meta tags provide a useful way to control the indexing of HTML web pages in some search engines.

Object ID (Getty Museum): http://www.object-id.com/

In 1993, the Getty Information Institute initiated an international collaborative project to establish consensus on a minimum standard for the identification and protection of cultural objects. Consultations and worldwide surveys of over 1,000 organizations in 84 countries have produced Object ID, a set of essential categories required to identify an object.

MARC -- MAchine-Readable Cataloging record: http://lcweb.loc.gov/marc/umb/

The USMARC formats are standards for the representation and communication of bibliographic and related information in machine-readable form. A USMARC record involves three elements: the record structure, the content designation, and the data content of the record.

METS -- Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard: http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/

The METS schema is a standard for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library, expressed using the XML schema language of the World Wide Web Consortium. The standard is maintained in the Network Development and MARC Standards Office of the Library of Congress, and is being developed as an initiative of the Digital Library Federation.

MODS -- Metadata Object Description Scheme: http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/

A schema for a bibliographic element set that may be used for a variety of purposes, and particularly for library applications. As an XML schema, the "Metadata Object Description Schema" (MODS) is intended to be able to carry selected data from existing MARC 21 records as well as to enable the creation of original resource description records.

TEI -- Text Encoding Initiative: http://www.tei-c.org/

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is an international project to develop guidelines for the preparation and interchange of electronic texts for scholarly research, and to satisfy a broad range of uses by the language industries more generally. A new TEI Consortium has been formed to maintain and continue the work of the TEI.