Metadata for Digital Collections

Graduate Workshop (1 credit hour)
Marcia Lei Zeng, Ph.D.
SLIS, KSU


Intended Audience:
Practicing library and information professionals and anyone who is involved in establishing digital collections in distinct information communities for the purposes of managing, publishing, and preserving documents in the digital environment.

Goals and Objectives:
Metadata is a critical mechanism both in knowledge representation of digital collections and in data mining. Metadata describes the attributes of a resource, where the resource may consist of bibliographical objects (e.g., as represented by MARC metadata), archival inventories and registers (e.g., EAD metadata), geospatial objects (e.g., FGDC metadata), museum and visual resources (e.g., CDWA, VRA, CIMI metadata), or software implementation (e.g., CORBA). This workshop examines the role of metadata in the digital environment. Emphasis is on the development and implementation of metadata schemas in distinct information communities and on the standards and technological applications used to create machine understandable metadata.

After completing the workshop, the students will be able:

1. to understand the concepts and structure of metadata;
2. to explore various operational and proposed metadata standards for specific digital collections;
3. to understand different issues in the applications of metadata standards in a larger context of a project, a community, and the society;
4. to acquaint experience in applying a selected metadata standard to records or collections;
5. to be able to design, evaluate, and modify metadata elements according to local need; and
6. to contribute to the implementation of metadata in a website or a database.