Jelena Andonovski
andonovski@unilib.bg.ac.rs

Nataša Dakić
dakic@unilib.bg.ac.rs

Univerzitetska biblioteka „Svetozar Marković“, Beograd

No. 28 (May 2016), p. 65-77

Metadata Schemas in Modern Librarianship

Summary

Digitization, i.е. transfer materials into its digital form, has a great significance for the preservation of cultural and scientific heritage of each nation. It also represents the basis for the establishment of the knowledge society to which every European country in the 21st century strives. One of the most important tasks in the process of digitization is organizing and linking digital content, but also connecting newly born digital collections which are part of various, but primarily related institutions – archives, libraries and museums. Therefore, the creation of digital repositories, which can be defined as institutionally and thematically organized collections of digital documents (objects), has been increasing during the past few years. In the beginning, International Standard Bibliographic Description for Electronic Resources – ISBD(ER) was used for the purpose of describing a digital object. However, newly created requirements for managing, permanent archiving and understanding of a digital object as an entity in a digital repository led to the establishment of new types of data, called metadata. In order to allow a unique exchange of metadata in the context of digital repositories and digitization projects, various standardized schemas have been created. They are developed on the basis of existing international standards for bibliographic description and are syntactically designed so that computers could easily process them, and end users could use them with more comfort and ease. Today, metadata are commonly used in library and information science as a powerful tool which allows better visibility and accessibility of digital objects throughout the web. The process of creating metadata greatly depends on the material which is being described, and is in accordance with the needs of the end users and the community that produces them. Around the world, there are many developed metadata schemas, and the most common one is Dublin Core, which at the same time represents a base for all the other, later developed schemas. Dublin Core is also the most general and one of the easiest standards for metadata creation. In the field of library and information science, beside Dublin Core, widely used schemas are TEI Header, METS, MODS and many others.

Keywords:

digitization, metadata, repositories, metadata schemas, XML, Dublin Core, TEI, METS, MODS

Submitted: 9th March 2016
Correction to the manuscript: 26th March 2016
Accepted for publication: 7th April 2016.

Metadata Schemas in Modern Librarianship by Jelena Andonovski and Nataša Dakić is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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