Tracking Metadata Use for Digital Collections

We are investigating how resource developers can best represent digital collections and items to meet the requirements of divergent service providers and user communities. Our first goal is to establish a baseline that describes the institutions, collections, and initial metadata schemes of Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grant (NLG) digital collection projects. This research is a component of the larger Digital Collections and Content (DCC) Project, funded by IMLS to build a collection registry and metadata repository for the NLG collections. Collection registries organize large aggregations of digital content from multiple institutions to make relevant resources easier to find and more visible to end-users [1]. As we gain in interoperability, we do not want to lose advances that have been made in adaptation and access for communities of users. Library collection functions that attend to user-based criteria are key to the success of distributed digital collection services [2]. Variations in metadata standards reflect the variant roles and use of digital objects and the different aims and practices of resource developers and their constituent user communities. In this poster we outline the types of institutions, metadata schemes, and materials contained in the NLG digital collection projects. It should come as no surprise that MARC and Dublin Core are the most often used metadata schemes in these projects, and that academic libraries make up the majority of the institutions involved in creating digital collections. However, we found it interesting that whether or not a project was collaborative, and not the type of material contained in the collection, seemed to influence what metadata scheme was chosen. From the baseline information gathered for this poster we can begin to understand the evolution of metadata issues within and between projects over time to inform the development of useful and usable collection aggregations.