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Library of Congress American Memory

Group 3: The Digers
Beverly Fanganello: Background
Jessica Sturgill: Audience
Katherine Larock: Collections
Thyria Wilson: Metadata and Context
Sean Crow: Usability Issues

Background
http://www.loc.gov/about/

Collections, Audience
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem//


Metadata and Context for Digital Resources

Library of Congress has long been in the forefront of collaborative projects, including helping to create and maintain standards in metadata. LOC's' American Memory program was intended as an extensive deposit that all could use to learn about the past.

Photo of Suffrage Campaign in NJ: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/vfwhtml/vfwhome.html

Projects/Groups:

  1. Ameritech: In 1997 the LOC and Ameritech collaborated that would bring special collections of other libraries into to the Library's American Memory Project. As part of that project, metadata issues were explored.
  2. Open Archives initiative: In 1999 the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) met. The emphasis was on keeping technical barriers to entry low, generic common denominator metadata schema that would be mandatory for purposes of basic interoperability across domains, opportunity to make the resources more broadly available. LOC was an early adopter of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) to make records available for integration into other services. The protocol now requires that the data be in Dublin Core structure and XML.
  3. Digital Library Federation: In 1996 the Digital Library Federation (DFL) met to consider recommendations for descriptive metadata and an architecture to provide common access to collections. . Rather than establish a single architectural design—DLF promoted standards development for components that would be required in any architecture.
  4. Making of America II: Mellon Foundation project Making of America II (MOAII) is based on a pooled collection of finding aids and a common Extended Markup Language (XML) based metadata structure.

Types of Metadata used by the LOC :

  1. MARC: The LOC Prints and Photographs Division used MARC records and followed Anglo-American Cataloging Rules. Currently transforming from MARC to simple Dublin Core.
  2. Dublin Core: Dublin Core is the name for fifteen elements used to create a set of metadata that can be used to describe digital objects on the Web. If different institutions use the same elements, the data can be combined for searching.
  3. EAD: Encoded Archival Description (EAD) Finding Aids. Links to archival finding aids available online at LOC. The finding aids have been marked up following the EAD standard. http://www.loc.gov/ead/eaddev.html .
  4. SGML/XML: American Memory Document Type Description (DTD) used Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). The finding aids are now being converted from SGML to Extended Markup Language (XML). XML DTD defines the digital object's elements and encoding. A program reads the database and automatically creates encoded digital objects.

Crosswalks and Interoperability: LOC developed crosswalks between different metadata standards and developed standards for EAD. Crosswalks map one standard to another allowing loading of records created on one system into another system. LOC has developed many of these crosswalks, and information on the crosswalks is available on the LOC web site.

Interoperability is the capability that allows different computer systems to share information in a network. Collaborative policies, procedures, and terminology in addition to system design.

Standards maintained by LOC :

Metadata – requires standards. LOC and National Library of Canada serve as the maintenance agencies for the MARC formats. The MARC in XML standard is maintained by the Library's Network Development and MARC Standards Office in partnership with the Society of American Archivsts.

Metadata Object Descriptive Schema (MODS) – maintained by the LOC—lies between the full MARC XML schema and Dublin Core. http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-userguide.html .

The LOC has subject headings at http://authorities.loc.gov/

A thesaurus for graphic materials is available at www.loc.gov/rr/print/tgm1/ .

LOC Metadata Transmission and Encoding Standard Official Website. http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/

page last revised 21 Jan 2005.