"Bringing Collections To Life" Seminar at The Guildhall Library, London - 29 October 2003

Brian Kelly gave a presentation on The Role Of Metadata at a meeting on "Bringing Collections To Life: Digitising Local Studies Materials" held at the The Guildhall Library on Wednesday 29^th October 2003 from 14:00-14:45.

The Role Of Metadata

Brief Abstract

Metadata has an important role to play in digital library programmes. In addition to the traditional role in helping resources to be discovered, metadata can provide the 'glue' for interoperable services. In order to help to achieve this goal a set of standards have been developed based on the Dublin Core metadata set. This presentation will seek to explain the key features of Dublin Core.

Full Abstract

Many cultural heritage bodies are involved in digitising resources in order to provide access to a wider community and to enable the digital resources to be used in ways which are not possible with physical resources, such as for e-learning and in virtual reality environments. Resources may also be digitised in order to preserve the physical object. In addition there is a need to address the preservation of the digitised resource.
Metadata has an important role to play in many of these activities. Resource discovery metadata is needed in order to ensure that individual resources can be found. Collection level description metadata is also needed in order to ensure that collections of resources can be found. Educational metadata is needed in order to allow resources to be used in a range of e-learning applications. Finally technical metadata is needed in order to record the technical processes employed in digitisation.
This presentation will describe the various ways in which metadata can be used and the standards which have been developed in order to maximise the interoperability of digitised resources, with particular reference to the Dublin Core and associated standards.

Speaker

Brian Kelly (UKOLN, University if Bath)

Biographical Details

Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus - a post funded by the JISC and Resource to advise the UK's higher and further education communities and the cultural heritage sector on Web developments. Brian works at UKOLN, a national centre of expertise in digital information management, which is based at the University of Bath. Brian is project manager for QA Focus - a JISC-funded advisory service which seeks to ensure that the deliverables of from JISC's 5/99, FAIR and X4L digital library programmes comply with appropriate standards and best practices in order to ensure interoperability.

Materials

Slides

[MS Powerpoint 97/2000 format] - [HTML format]

Handouts

An Introduction To Metadata
Metadata Deployment
Quality Assurance For Metadata