Study group on metadata standards and applications in the cultural heritage field

The ICCU, among the several activities for metadata use, set up in the year 2000, a metadata standards and applications within cultural heritage sector Study Group, which archives, libraries, and museums representatives participated to.

The Group was born with the aim to coordinate at a national level the metadata implementations in digitization projects in the different cultural heritage sectors, and  to connect the Italian initiatives with the European and International ones.

At the beginning, the group elaborated and disseminated a survey questionnaire to create an observatory for metadata applications within digitization projects in the different institutions: list of the projects using metadata in Italy.

The Study Group, operative from 2000 to 2002, is divided in two subgroups:

Starting from July 2003 has been formally create a permanent Workgroup to continue to the activities started by the Study Group for metadata standards and applications within cultural heritage sector, with a particular reference to the MAG set dissemination and evolution activities:


Descriptive Metadata Subgroup

The subgroup prepared a descriptive data collection model to find out the essential metadata elements to identify the digital object, to share descriptive information among institutions using different catalographic formats. For metadata set definition has appeared useful, where possible and applicable, to refer to a logical model and to the IFLA study indications in the "Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records" (FRBR) applying the attribute list and the relations to the digital resource descriptions.

The data for Metadata or for Profiles with rules and specific sectors descriptive standards: historical, artistic, of museums, of libraries, and of official documentation (Reports and Parliamentary Acts) have been compared with the use of the “mapping”. They started from the Dublin Core elements set to make a first comparison and a first test because the consolidate standard at a national and international level allows a wide gamma of digital objects description.

Management Administrative Metadata Subgroup – MAG

The Management Administrative Metadata and structural subgroup has the aim to define a metadata set for:

  • digital resource access policy and formalities
  • digital objects and relative services organization and management
  • preservation strategies for a long period of the same object

The key component and the processes for electronic documents recording, management and preservation activities have been considered. On the base of Open Archive Information System (OAIS) model and on the Library of Congress set used for digitization project and preliminary draft for management and administrative metadata schema has been elaborated.

The document has been afterwards completely reviewed and, on the base of the METS (Metadati Encoding & Transmission Standard), model used by the Library of Congress, and on the base of the acquired experience within the  Biblioteca Nazionale centrale di Firenze ARSBNI ( National Italian Bibliography Services Enrichment)  project, the MAG Group produced an XML Schema and prepared a minimal management metadata set for their application in digitization projects.

The schema gives formal specifications for metadata and digital data collection and transferring in the respective archives (SIP phase in the OAIS model).

Each metadata format is used associated to a Namespace which fixes the terminology in a not ambiguous way, and to a syntactic structure of a XMLSchema.

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