Journal of the American Society for Information Science
Collection Level Description - the Museum Perspective
Collection Level Description - the Museum Perspective
Archives Described at Collection Level
Archives Described at Collection Level
Using collection descriptions to enhance an aggregation of harvested item-level metadata
Proceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries
Metadata aggregation and "automated digital libraries": a retrospective on the NSDL experience
Proceedings of the 6th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries
Tracking metadata use for digital collections
DCMI '03 Proceedings of the 2003 international conference on Dublin Core and metadata applications: supporting communities of discourse and practice---metadata research & applications
Beyond size and search: building contextual mass in digital aggregations for scholarly use
Proceedings of the 73rd ASIS&T Annual Meeting on Navigating Streams in an Information Ecosystem - Volume 47
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With the increasing focus on interoperability for distributed digital content, resource developers need to take into consideration how they will contribute to large federated collections, potentially at the national and international level. At the same time, their primary objectives are usually to meet the needs of their own institutions and user communities. This tension between local practices and needs and the more global potential of digital collections has been an object of study for the IMLS Digital Collections and Content (IMLS DCC) project. Our practical aim has been to provide integrated access to over 160 IMLS-funded digital collections through a centralized collection registry and metadata repository. During the course of development, the research team has investigated how collections and items can best be represented to meet the needs of local resource developers and aggregators of distributed content, as well as the diverse user communities they may serve. This paper presents results from a longitudinal analysis of IMLS DCC development trends between 2003 and 2006. Changes in metadata applications have not been pronounced. However, multi-scheme use has become less common, and use of Dublin Core remains high, even as recognition of its limitations grows. Locally developed schemes are used as much as MARC, and may be on the increase as new collections are incorporating less traditional library and museum materials, and more interactive and multimedia content. Based on our empirical understanding of metadata use in practice, patterns in new content development, and user community indicators, our research has turned toward identifying metadata relationships between items and collections to preserve context and enhance functionality and usefulness for scholarly user communities.