New Project Metadata

Creating Metadata for Discovery

Providing good, detailed information about your file an effective way to make sure your file can be discovered in search. It's also useful for you as a steward of your file to record what you know about the file so that information doesn't get lost. But what information is important to record?

Required Elements

The DRS requires users to supply only two basic elements about a file:

Title

A good title is a brief descriptive statement that is used to uniquely identify the resource and its content.

Keyword

Keywords are simply terms used to identify the content of the resource. Only one keyword is required, but 3 - 5 keywords are recommended.

Recommended Elements

Creator names

Date Created

Description

Optional Elements

Publisher

Subjects from a controlled vocabulary

Best Practices

Creator Names

Enter creator names as LastName, FirstName

Consistency

Copying and pasting can be problematic.

If you do need to copy and paste, copy the source text and paste it into a basic text editor, like Wordpad or TextEdit, then copy that text and paste the value. This will prevent special formatting from causing errors when the files are uploaded. There are also some tricky characters out there that always cause problems, and they won't be ironed out by pasting into a plain text editor. The "&" is the biggest culprit. If you do want to use an ampersand, please use the character encoding for ampersand, which is & or &.

Custom Description

Some projects have chosen to incorporate information specific to their collections, including:

• Collection Name
• Rights statement
• Course name
• Course instructor