7 - Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research

structural metadata, it is impossible to manage digital objects in a reposting and guide user
interaction with these. But as in the case of descriptive metadata, structured metadata
creation is also a costly affairs if done manually. The European Union-funded METAe
Project is developing automatic process for this as on economical way out.
4.3 Administrative Metadata
Administrative metadata records information about the creation of the digital object such
as: initial capture settings, scanner parameters, file formats, programme used to create it,
compression technology date of creation, version, etc. It also records information about the
legal and financial aspects of access to the object like rights management, payments, costs,
and authentication. It encompasses any information that might be of use of future
caretakers of that object and it records all the events that happen to it during the entire
lifecycle. Administrative metadata may reside within or outside the digital objects and
includes all the information needed for presentation to ensure ‘digital longevity’.
5. Types of Metadata Standards
Metadata can generally be viewed as being of various types:
• Dublin Core
• Machine Readable Catalogue (MARC)
• Global (Government) Information Locator Service (GILS)
• The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)
• The Encoded Archival Description (EAD)
5.1 Dublin Core:
The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set arose from discussions at a 1995 workshop
sponsored by OCLC and the national Centre for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).
As the workshop was held in Dublin, Ohio, the element set was named the Dublin Core.
The continuing development of the Dublin Core and related specifications is managed by
the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI).
Core was to define a set of elements that could be used by authors to describe their own
Web resources. Faced with a proliferation of electronic resources and the inability of the
library profession to catalogue all these resources, the goal was to define a few elements
and some simple rules that could be applied by noncatalogers.
The original 13 core elements were later increased to 15 : title, subject, description,
source, language, relation, coverage, creator, publisher, contributor, rights, date, type,
format, and identifier. The Dublin Core was developed to be simple and concis, and to
describe Web-based documents.
However, Dublin Core has used with other types of materials and in applications
demanding some complexity. There has historically been some tension between supporters
of a “minimalist” view, who emphasize the need to keep the elements to a minimum and
the semantics and syntax simple, and supporters of a “structuralist” view who argue for
finer semantic distinctions and more extensibility for particular communities.
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