Rich Interoperable Metadata for Cultural Heritage Projects at Jagiellonian University

TL;DR

This paper addresses the challenge of storing rich, interoperable metadata for cultural heritage objects at Jagiellonian University by analyzing existing standards and proposing a flexible schema to enhance data integration.

Contribution

It compares current metadata practices at JU with major standards and proposes a new conceptual model to improve interoperability and facilitate data integration.

Findings

Mapping between standards is problematic

Identified requirements for a flexible metadata schema

Preliminary results guide future schema development

Abstract

The rich metadata created nowadays for objects stored in libraries has nowhere to be stored, because core standards, namely MARC 21 and Dublin Core, are not flexible enough. The aim of this paper is to summarize our work-in-progress on tackling this problem in research on cultural heritage objects at the Jagiellonian University (JU). We compared the objects' metadata currently being collected at the JU (with examples of manuscript, placard, and obituary) with five widespread metadata standards used by the cultural heritage community: Dublin Core, EAD, MODS, EDM and Digital Scriptorium. Our preliminary results showed that mapping between them is indeed problematic, but we identified requirements that should be followed in further work on the JU cultural heritage metadata schema in order to achieve maximum interoperability. As we move forward, based on the successive versions of the conceptual model, we will conduct experiments to validate the practical feasibility of these mappings and the degree to which the proposed model will actually enable integration with data in these various metadata formats.