New Project Metadata

Creating Metadata for Discovery

Providing good, detailed information about your file is the best way for users to find it when searching. It's also useful for you as a steward of your file to record what is known about the file so the information doesn't get lost. So what information is important to record?

Required Elements

• Title:
• Keyword:

Recommended

• Creator name, formatted as "LastName, FirstName MiddleName, Title"
• Date Created, formatted as YYYY-MM-DD (This only applies to objects that are not born digital. Objects that are natively digital will have the creation date embedded in the file.)
• Description

Optional

• Subjects from a controlled vocabulary

Best Practices

• Creator Names: Enter creator names as LastName, FirstName
• Consistency is important
• 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 &.

Fields used for past projects:

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