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Assign Metadata to digital objects

What metadata is?

Gartener (2021) describes metadata as data about data. It is constructed for a specific purpose that it serves and cannot be universal.Metadata helps in define or describe an object. Three categories of metadata namely descriptive, administrative and structural metadata. For a digital library to operate effectively they should all be present.


                                            Metadata explained.


The three Categories of metadata



Descriptive metadata: 

Amongst the three, descriptive metadata is the most visible. It is also called the finding metadata because it is an information that assist in determining and locating items within a collection in a digital library or repository. Information that describes an item includes authors, subject, tittle, place of publication, publisher, date, edition, volume. This information can also be called about information. It helps to identify, discover and select an item in the digital library.

Administrative metadata

This category of metadata describes the technical features of a digital object, actions for preserving it, the intellectual property rights and access permissions. Administrative metadata is is crucial for preserving the digital resources.see also . Administrative metadata has four subdivisions.

Technical metadata

Pomerantz (2015:95) shows that this metadata is common with the photographic items. Items such as digital photography or a video. Data is created automatically . Moreover technical data comes with file when it it shared or transferred. It is generated when the object is created and is invisible at the time of creation.

Rights metadata

This metadata deals with intellectual property rights. It important as it describe the intellectual property right of materials held in the digital library collection as objects can be altered and moved around. Digital libraries developers need to protect their intellectual property rights. IT applies to materials which are made freely available and the ones which are not. Furthermore, it indicate the copyright under which terms an item is made available and who holds the rights. 

Preservation metadata
This branch deals with the requirements for preserving the content in the the long term.It has a set of protocols that ensures long term preservation of collections.The main function of preservation metadata is to provide contextual information for a digital object.
 
Source Metadata
This branch deals with sources which are not born digital but are generated through digitization. It identifies primary source of an object instead of surrogate.This can be done by tagging or placing it within the overall metadata.

Structural metadata

This type of metadata describes the internal structure of an object, the components, and how the components relate to each other to create the whole object. For example structural metadata can be recorded in the form of table of contents
Structural metadata sample











 

 

 






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