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
Only two elements are required in the DRS:
- Title
- A good title is a brief descriptive statement that is used to identify the resource and its content.
- Keyword
- Keywords are terms used to identify the content of the resource. Only one keyword is required, but three to five keywords are recommended.
Recommended Elements
- Creator names
- Creators are typically persons or entities credited with the creation of the resource being described, or contributed to its creation. The creator's name should always be included, if it is known. A file can have more than one creator, and the creator can be a person or an entity, like Northeastern University.
- Personal creator example: Cauchon, Brad
- Entity creator example (also known as a corporate creator): Marlan Studio of Photography
- Date
- An item's date can refer to the date the item was originally created or published.
- Example: This photo of a sand sculpture was taken in July 1985, though the exact date is not known.
- Description/Abstract
- The description or abstract should contain a succinct description of an item’s content, including any valuable information that could not be included in the title.
- Example of a thorough description: La Bernache
- Example of a typical description: Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity
- Example of a typical abstract: Direct measurement of graphene adhesion on silicon surface by intercalation of nanoparticles
Other Possible Elements
- Notes
- Notes can be used to add additional information about an item.
- Provenance Note Example: Hand-drawn story
- Comments Note Example
- Application of geometric programming to the power systems economic dispatch optimization
- Physical Description
- Publisher
- Rights Statements
- 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