Bradley Shipps, Continuing Education and Outreach Librarian, Outagamie Waupaca Library System This is the second part of a two-part, full-day workshop introducing the core elements of creating digital collections of historic photographs, documents and other archival materials. Part 2 focuses on sharing your digitized materials with the world and steps you can take to ensure that they’ll remain usable and accessible into the future. We’ll define metadata and why it’s important, and consider approaches to creating descriptive metadata for discovery of historical resources. We’ll examine the issue of digital preservation, including practical steps you can take to preserve your digital content with limited resources. And we’ll think about digitization as a path to community engagement, including reaching out to your community for content and promoting your digital collections to your users.

1. Descriptive Metadata
for Historical
Collections
Digitization Basics for Archives and Special Collections
WiLSWorld, July 22, 2015

2. What is metadata?

3. Purposes of Metadata
O Description
O Structure
O Discoverability
O Interoperability
O Administration

4. Standardization
O Adopt a metadata schema: Dublin Core
O Use controlled vocabularies
O Follow a Metadata Style Guide
O Recollection Wisconsin Metadata Quick Guide
O Create a Data Dictionary for each project
O Implement quality control procedures

5. Levels of Description
O Collection description
O Subcollection description
O Item-level description
O Page-level description
Ex. Kaukauna Memory Project

6. Required Fields
O Title
O Subject
O Description*
*Not required by RW.
O Rights
O Submitter
O Type (ex. Still image; Text)
O Format (ex. image/tiff)
O Date Digitized
(YYYY-MM-DD)
O File Name

7. Depth of Description
O Who is the intended audience (K-12,
university, etc.)?
O What kind of information do you need to
provide so users can gain access to a
resource through their online searches?
O What do your users need to know about
what the Resource is, where it came from,
who created it, its significance?

9. Subject Field(s)
O What is this resource about? Consider people, environment,
activity, and objects.
O Select terms from a controlled vocabulary, such as Thesaurus
for Graphic Materials (TGM).
More on describing photos: http://www.slideshare.net/bcshipps/indexing-photographs

10. When subject terms stink…

11. Description Field

12. Recommended Fields
O Creator
O Date
O Contributors
O Publisher
O Language
O Community
O County
O State
O Medium
O Dimensions
O Digitization
information
O Source
O Contact
O Transcript

13. Example 1

14. Example 2

15. Example 3

16. Example 4

17. Descriptive Metadata Provides
O Information about the original physical item
and the digital representation
O Information about context and completeness
O Information about authenticity and authority
O Information about relationships
O Access points for various use cases
O Cues for further research

18. Questions?
Bradley Shipps, OWLS
920-832-6368
bshipps@mail.owls.lib.wi.us
http://memory.infosoup.org