Metadata Overview
The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines and the digital library community of practice offered a number of potential methods for representing article-level bibliographic metadata, including TEI Corpus, Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), and article-level TEI documents that link to the parent issue. After exploring these and other options, the TEI Independent Header eventually emerged as the best way to represent granular metadata for the online Indiana Magazine of History (IMH).
The auxiliary schema for the Independent Header (IHS) was developed to allow the exchange of bibliographic metadata for text collections to support the creation of indices and other aggregations. The creators of the schema did not necessarily envision the use of the Independent Header in serials encoding, but this method has a number of advantages. Utilizing the IHS in this fashion allows the TEI to function as the authoritative metadata source for the document, and allows the encoder to faithfully represent the issue-based structure of the original without compromising the unique identity of each article. It also supports our larger goal of interoperability with other text collections. Since the IHS is part of the TEI standard (P4 and earlier), the encoder does not have to extend or modify the DTD. This not only simplifies documentation needs for management and preservation, but also allows for easier reuse of content and integration with other collections.
By capturing article-level metadata using the TEI independent header, the TEI serves as the descriptive source for the IMH online from which we can derive functionality such as page turning and bibliographic metadata in other formats such as Dublin Core (DC) and Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) for sharing via the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). The Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) is used both to manage metadata about the digital objects that comprise the IMH online (archival and derivative images, XML files, etc.) and to drive page turning functionality for METS Navigator, an open source software developed by the IU Digital Library Program.
For more detailed information about metadata decisions and challenges, please refer to the Papers and Presentations section of the web site.
