Contents:
- Introduction
- Background
- Pilot Project: The WILL Transcription Disc Collection
- Digital Preservation Repository
- Choosing a Metadata Standard
- On Closer Inspection: Additional Metadata Concerns
- Project Workflow
- Lessons Learned
This paper, submitted to the IFLA WLIC 2013 meeting, describes how the University of Illinois Urbana decided on the MODS descriptive metadata standard for its audio-visual files. Once the university joined the Medusa digital preservation repository, it needed to develop guidelines on how to produce consistent descriptive metadata for a diverse collection of audio-visual materials. This paper documents the planning and implementation of metadata creation guidelines, why it chose MODS over PBCore and includes some of the challenges and solutions that arose in the process of harvesting and transforming disorganized collection information into discrete descriptive metadata records. Also included is an analysis of the conceived audio object packaging, file specifications, naming conventions, and directory structures. The paper also describes the pilot project, the WILL transcription disc collection, that benefited from implementation of an XML-based descriptive metadata creation workflow informed by these guidelines.
This is an interesting case study in how a university library decided on the implementation of the MODS metadata schema for an audio disc collection and illustrates the complexity archives confront in the description of audio material that has been migrated from analog sources to digital files. It makes a good case for the choices made and presents real world compromises that had to be made in order to ensure workflow scalability over time. It focuses only on the creation of descriptive metadata; the Medusa repository uses PREMIS for all administrative and technical metadata capture. It provides a possible approach to archives confronted with how to manage minimal, possibly inconsistent and incomplete descriptive metadata, the norm not the exception in audio-visual archives.