Keywords
Citation
Moore, M. (2012), "Metadata for Digital Collections: A How‐to‐do‐it Manual", Library Management, Vol. 33 No. 3, pp. 200-201. https://doi.org/10.1108/01435121211217261
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2012, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
The meteoric rise of the internet over the last two decades presents the librarian with an opportunity and a provocation. The opportunity is to bring the information management skills that librarians should have to massively more diffuse yet pervasive environment than the traditional library. On the other hand, the internet does not simply replicate the traditional library and it thus forces us to rethink and recalibrate our tools if we wish to stay relevant.
Metadata management is one such skill that librarian have the opportunity to leverage and the need to develop. This book explores the metadata management needs of digital collections. It describes itself as a manual and it lives up to its billing. It is big, chunky and contains over 170 figures and tables. The worked examples demonstrated in the figures are a critical part of the book and very useful.
After an introduction, chapters 2‐4 focus on the Dublin Core. Chapter 5 discusses controlled vocabularies. Chapter 6 discusses the use of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) to encode metadata. Chapters 7 and 8 outline the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) and Visual Resources Association Core Categories (VRA Core). Chapters 9‐11 discuss metadata interoperability, metadata scheme design and the semantic web.
Although its coverage is extensive, two important areas seemed to have been missed (as is inevitable with such a broad topic). The focus of the book is very much libraries, archives and museums with digital collections – and yet digital material is no longer limited to “cultural” institutions. It plays an increasing role in non‐cultural government agencies, not‐for‐profits and commercial enterprises. Metadata are driven by use and some consideration of the metadata needs of different contexts (especially non‐cultural contexts) would have been helpful.
The second point relates to the nature of a “digital collection”. The rapid growth of the Open Linked Data project (which is mentioned in the final chapter) means that when we are managing collections, only a small part of that collection or the resources related to it will be under our control. Metadata provides the vital glue that holds these distributed collections together and yet the implications of this for metadata practice are left largely to one side.
Books that encourage librarians to explore the full scope of their metadata heritage are to be welcomed and I encourage digital collections managers to read this one.