About
The workshop opened with comments by J. McDonough (NYU) regarding the origins and purpose of the workshop. University research libraries that have begun to create digital collections have encountered some common problems surrounding metadata and encoding for digitized versions of primary source material, including:
- inadequacy of traditional descriptive metadata schemes for describing digital objects;
- the absence of standards for administrative metadata; and
- the need for a flexible mechanism to express structural metadata regarding digitized
versions of a wide range of materials in different formats (text, image, audio, video, etc.). The Making of America II project (MOA2), sponsored in part by the Digital Library Federation, attempted to address some of these issues, and created an XML DTD based on the research the project participants had done on descriptive, administrative and structural metadata schemes. This XML format provided a single document type that could encode descriptive, administrative and structural metadata for a wide range of materials. However, it was intentionally restricted to textual and image materials, and so does not adequately support the needs of those trying to create digital libraries of audio-visual materials. A variety of other shortcomings of the DTD have also been identified by those trying to employ the DTD. This workshop was intended to try to examine the use of MOA2 to date and see if a successor format could be created which would rectify the MOA2 DTD’s shortcomings.