Digital library - B.D.P.A. Provincial Digital Library P. Albino, Campobasso

Home >	Metadata		last update May 24th, 2004

The metadata

The metadata are structured information that describe and locate everything that can make easier retrieving, using or managing of an information resource. Often they are defined as "data about data" or "information about information". A metadata record consists of an attribute or element set, necessary to describe the resource.

The metadata structure (description) proposed by the S.I.M.B.A.D. project is divided in five sections:

SECTION	DESCRIPTION	example for object class type
Header	describes the document	fondo	foglio
Descriptive	contains descriptive metadata resource	fondo	foglio
Administrative	contains the information about the object resource's provenance and the information about the resources' creation, archiving and rights	fondo	foglio
Files	contains the content file list and the different versions	fondo	foglio
Structural map	describes the hierarchical structure of the resources and the relations	fondo	foglio

The metadata are structured by referring to the OAIS model and to the following standards:

Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) for the files encoding
Dublin Core for the descriptive metadata
RDF for the simple description of the information resource (Expressing Simple Dublin Core in RDF/XML)
Metadati Amministrativi e Gestionali (MAG) as integration of the administrative metadata
(MIX) technical metadata by NISO for the digital still images

The structure comprehends every useful metadata for digital resource description, retrieving and management. Nevertheless every data are not available, and especially the technical data (MIX), it was decided to carry on the whole XML structure, for making easier the upgrade, whenever will be avalaible.

For the descriptive metadata, instead it was chosen to duplicate the data, available in the Virtual Library (BV), with the specific objective to highlight the relations between the metadata set and the data. Even though, it's a data redundancy case, it was considered the pilot nature of the structure, and it was given more importance to the facility features: if, in the future, a library clerk will be opening a file XML, the data repetition and redundancy and the appropriate reference to the data could help for the object relation reconstruction, making more comprehensible the structure and the complexity grade of the information addressed by structure.

N.B. Not all the XML tags from the adopted standards didn't match to some bibliographic metadata available in the BPA legacy system, consequently some independent XML tags were inserted, however.