7 - Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research

In the Internet era, digital libraries represent completely new information
infrastructures and knowledge environments. Integrating and utilizing the newest
computer and communication technologies and digital content, the digital library
builds huge extendable and interoperable collections. In order to manage the
massive scale of these digital collections effectively, establishing a metadata
model and application profile has become a fundamental part of any digital library
project.
In conclusion, Metadata management would Reduce Development Time and
Improve Quality, Reduce Maintenance Time, Improve Support Response Time
and Improve User Access to Information. In other words, Metadata management
would streamline the application development process.
1. Introduction
A major component of Information Management is Metadata management, and Metadata
plays an inevitable role in Digital Libraries. Metadata is structured information that
describes resources. While the resources are interesting to the end user, the metadata is
helpful to the people or programs that have to manage the information. Catalogue records
for library materials are a common example of metadata. Usually the metadata describes
the content, physical description, location, type and form of the information, and
information necessary for management including migration history, expiry dates, security,
authentication, file formats and relationship with other versions.
2. Metadata
Metadata is not a new concept; it has existed in the computer science field for decades,
and refers to information about electronic computer files. To update the concept a bit, the
term "metadata" is now used to refer to information about any digital object that exists on
the Internet. The need for certain types of data (such as creation date, file size, etc.) might
seem obvious if one is managing a large group of digital objects merely as files. However,
the Internet and World Wide Web offer great promise in terms of precision management,
discovery and retrieval of digital objects such as images, e-texts, multimedia presentations,
and other electronic files. Metadata may manifest itself either as an embedded, integral
part of the digital object, to be retrieved and manipulated for various purposes, or it may
exist externally from the digital object. Metadata often is broken into three broad
categories:
• Descriptive metadata: Information that conveys some sense of intellectual
content and context.
• Structural Metadata: Information that describes the attributes of an object, such
as size, electronic format, and digital capture process.
• Administrative metadata: Information regarding rights management, creation
date of the digital resource, hardware configuration, etc.
A "descriptive" metadata record consists of a set of elements, such as title, creator, format,
date of creation, and subject coverage, that are necessary for describing a particular
resource. In general, only descriptive metadata is visible to the users of a system, who
search and browse it to find and assess the value of items in the collection. Administrative
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