Debbie and Renato,
There are lots of other communities working on administrative metadata at
this point, and defining it quite differently. I worry about coopting
the phrase itself for a very narrowly focused definition.
In the circles in which I travel, administrative metadata is thought of
as one of 3 extremely loose, fuzzy, and intersecting buckets: descriptive,
administrative, and structural metadata, all of which are necessary to
completely access and manage digital content. Without getting hung up
on the specifics, see the excerpt below from the Making of America 2 White
Paper draft as typical and illustrative of the way the phrase is used in
the library community in the U.S.:
"3) Administrative Metadata
"Administrative metadata consists of the information that allows the
repository to manage its digital collection. This includes:
"Data related to the creation of the digital image (date of
scan, resolution, etc.);
"Data that can identify an instantiation (version/edition) of
the image and help determine what is needed to view or use it (storage or
delivery file format, compression scheme, filename/location, etc.) and;
"Ownership, rights, and reproduction information.
[.. snipped...]
"Administrative metadata is critical for long-term file management.
Without well-designed administrative metadata, image file contents may be
as unrecognizable and unreadable a decade from now as Wordstar or VisiCalc
files are today. Administrative metadata should help future administrators
determine the type of file it is, when it was created, what particular
original it was created from, what methods or personnel might
have introduced artifacts into the image, and where the different parts of
this (or related) digital object reside. Eventually, we hope that
administrative metadata may help objects care for their own long-term
management."
Your definitions talk about administration of the *metadata* for a
resource, while mine would talk about the administration of the resource
itself. Since metadata can now be considered a first-class object
(thanks, Carl!), is this a meaningful distinction? Could your
definitions be broadened (e.g., personal creator = the person
responsible for "managing or administering" a resource) and still be
useful for what you are trying to accomplish, possibly by adding
something to indicate what the resource is, the object or the metadata?
I don't know what the solution is, but I'd hate to have the phrase
"administrative metadata" become off-limits to digital library management
because an RFC defines it as administrative data about metadata (if you
follow me...).
Apologies if my concerns are less than coherently expressed -- a week on
the road and a delayed flight home have taken their toll. I hope you can
make sense of it all.
--Robin
Robin Wendler ........................ work (617) 495-3724
Office for Information Systems ....... fax (617) 495-0491
Harvard University Library ........... [log in to unmask]
Cambridge, MA, USA 02138 .............
On Wed, 1 Jul 1998, Debbie Campbell wrote:
> The MetaWeb Project has developed an Internet Draft RFC for administrative
> metadata, to manage the integrity and currency of any applied metadata
> description. We seek your feedback on any component of the RFC or its
> implementation.
>
> It is available at http://metadata.net/admin for comment.
>
> Thank you,
> Debbie Campbell
> MetaWeb Project Coordinator
> ph. 02 6262 1673
> fx. 02 6273 1180
> e-mail [log in to unmask]
> http://purl.nla.gov.au/metaweb/home
>
>
>
>
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