The purpose of this document is to guide the description of digital collection resources using Dublin Core, MODS, and MARC21 to facilitate access to Florida Academic Libraries’ Digital Collections (i.e. through catalog or discovery for patrons) from FLVC Library Services member institutions as well as the general public. The State-Wide Metadata Standards Subgroup of the Digital Initiatives Standing Committee (DISC) was established to develop metadata standards that could be used by Florida’s Academic Libraries to provide quality, control, and unification to the metadata amongst the vast, unique, and diverse digital collections held throughout the state of Florida. This document will address the description and discovery of digital collection resources by suggesting standards for a variety of metadata elements. These elements were chosen due to their importance with description and discovery for the intended audiences of the digital collection resources. Because of this it is encouraged that all eleven elements within this guide are applied to each digital collection resource, where possible and applicable. In general, the metadata elements should describe the original resource, not the digital representation.
The Metadata Subgroup meet monthly from April 2019 - August 2020. Meetings will be held as needed. The Statewide Metadata Document, approved in the September 2020 DISC meeting, should be reviewed by the Metadata Subgroup a minimum of once each year.
Phase 1
The first version of this document outlines standards for eleven metadata elements:
Title
Creator
Contributor
Date
Format
Language
Rights
Geographic/Spatial Coverage
Source
Abstract
Publisher
Participation by a variety of individuals from FLVC members was crucial to the development of this document. At various points in times, members of the working group included: (*Denotes Author)
Rebel Cummings-Sauls, FALSC Liaison*
Elena Soltau (Lead)*
Mark Lopez*
Sai Deng*
Donna Fluharty
Kaleena Rivera
Robert Phillips
Keila Zayas Ruiz
Background
From the Panhandle to the Keys, FLVC provides services and support for the public college and university libraries of Florida. Through a variety of products and services, FLVC offers support to a variety of digital collections and it is their desire to have agnostic, uniformed, and statewide standards that can be used across platforms or formats. FLVC supports the cooperative building of shared collections using common standards and a shared infrastructure. Projects may involve a single university or college or may involve collaborative efforts between universities, colleges, and partners within or outside of the state university or college systems.
The Publication of Archival, Library, and Museum Materials (PALMM, http://palmm.fcla.edu), is an umbrella program supporting the cooperative building of shared collections using common standards. It is a cooperative initiative of the public universities and colleges of Florida to provide digital access to important source materials for research and scholarship. The majority of PALMM’s materials focus on Florida subjects. Its projects may involve a single university/college, a collaborative effort between a university/college, and partners within, or outside, of the State University System and Florida College System. Any public university or college in Florida may apply to share digital collections in PALMM. The PALMM program began when universities were just beginning to develop digital collections and had little access to digital asset management systems (DAMS). FLVC, formerly FCLA, coordinated grant funding for digitization and implemented the DAMS system. As part of the initial implementation the first metadata guidelines were developed in 2003. A joint working group with members from the Metadata Subcommittee of the Technical Services Planning Committee and the Digital Initiatives Subcommittee of the Technology Advisory Group was established in 2009 to address the issue from the perspective of both cataloging and digital collections. The PALMM 2.0 guidelines document set out to revise and update the Cataloging and Access Guidelines for Electronic Resources, Part 1: SUS Digitization Projects created July 2003, informally known as the "CAGER Guidelines.” The 2010 PALMM 2.0 drafted guidelines were never officially approved by the overseeing committees from the best recollection of the history of this initiative. Previous versions of the guidelines were never strictly instilled with PALMM collections, although they were used in part to set configurations on the metadata for ingested content.
In July 2018, the Sunshine State Digital Network (SSDN) developed SSDN harvesting guidelines. These guidelines were created by the Sunshine State Digital Network Metadata Working Group and provide guidance for libraries, archives, and museums who wish to contribute their metadata to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) through the SSDN. SSDN guidelines are intended to help potential and current partners create, enhance, and map their metadata records for contribution to DPLA.
The standards developed within this Statewide Metadata Standards for Florida Academic Libraries will replace CAGER and PALMM 2.0 guides for collaborative collections, support institutions inclusion in the SSDN, and provide the state academic libraries common standards in displaying their metadata, including for inclusion in the Florida Open Academic Library. The Florida Open Academic Library, https://openlib.flvc.org, provides a statewide searchable database that includes an inventory of digital archives and collections held by public postsecondary education institutions (§ F.S. 1006.73 (2)(a)4.). Through collaboration with FLVC member libraries, we are pleased to bring together over one million unique and valuable resources to discover.