To ensure that the digital collections submitted to RLG Cultural Materials can be discovered and understood, RLG has compiled these Descriptive Metadata Guidelines for contributors. While these guidelines reflect the needs of one particular service, they also represent a case study in information sharing across community and national boundaries. RLG Cultural Materials engages a wide range of contributors with different local practices and institutional priorities. Since it is impossible to find -- and impractical to impose -- one universally applicable standard as a submission format, RLG encourages contributors to follow the suite of standards applicable to their particular community (p.1).
Critical Arguements
CA "These guidelines . . . do not set a new standard for metadata submission, but rather support a baseline that can be met by any number of strategies, enabling participating institutions to leverage their local descriptions. These guidelines also highlight the types of metadata that enhance functionality for RLG Cultural Materials. After a contributor submits a collection, RLG maps that description into the RLG Cultural Materials database using the RLG Cultural Materials data model. This ensures that metadata from the various participant communities is integrated for efficient searching and retrieval" (p.1).
Conclusions
RQ Not applicable.
SOW
DC RLG comprises more than 150 research and cultural memory institutions, and RLG Cultural Materials elicits contributions from countless museums, archives, and libraries from around the world that, although they might retain local descriptive standards and metadata schemas, must conform to the baseline standards prescribed in this document in order to integrate into RLG Cultural Materials. Appendix A represents and evaluates the most common metadata standards with which RLG Cultural Materians is able to work.
