Week 5: Learning Metadata

 

Hello everyone, and welcome back to my blog. If you did not read the first entry of mine, my name is Hiram Davila. I am a student at the University of Central Florida and will be graduating this semester. This blog post will be following my internship with RICHES Digital Archive throughout the Spring 2023 semester.

 

I do not have too much to report this week. Unlike the past weeks where I have worked on making and revising a transcript of an oral history, this week was much more about learning about my next task rather than doing it. As I talked about last week in my blog post, I will be working with metadata for my next task. Looking back at my old post, the Charizard example I gave only scratched the surface of what metadata actually is.

 

To walk you through my understanding of metadata thus far, I first learned what the standard for metadata is. Called the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES), it consists of 15 core elements, known as the Simple Dublin Core. Some of the Simple Dublin Core elements are: Title, Subject, Source, Relation, Creator, Publisher, Date, Language, etc. . The Simple Dublin Core is considered the minimum amount of metadata to be collected that is internationally accepted.[1] The Qualified Dublin Core was created later and allowed digital collections to define items with more detail.[2]

 

Lucky for me, RICHES has made their own Metadata Element Set that has taken some elements from the Simple Dublin Core and mixes it with RICHES specific elements. The Set consists of 8 different elements and I am currently reading an in depth guide on each element. I am hoping that by this weekend I will be finished with my reading and will be creating my own metadata spreadsheet next week.

Also, next week on Monday is an event I mentioned a few weeks back. The event is being put on at the Historic Oviedo Colored Schools Museum and is to celebrated the upgrades that are going to soon take place on the building. I am excited to be going with another RICHES team member and look forward to recording my experience from the event.

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[1] “North Carolina Dublin Core, Implementation Guidelines,” North Carolina Exploring Heritage Online, http://www.ncecho.org/dig/ncdc2007.shtml.

[2] “Using Dublin Core – Dublin Core Qualifiers,” Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, 1995-2011, http://dublincore.org/documents/usageguide/qualifiers.shtml.