Context and Meaning: The Challenges of Metadata for a Digital Image Library within the University

To be successful in the university environment, a digital library must be able to integrate content from faculty and students, as well as traditional library sources. It must have a robust metadata structure that can accommodate and preserve a variety of discipline-specific metadata while supporting consistent access across collections. As part of the Mellon-funded project, the Visual Image User Study at Penn State, a prototype centralized digital image delivery service was created and explored. In creating a metadata schema for the project, the authors anticipated both a wide variety of content and users across many disciplines. This schema employed three very differ- ent standards (VRA Core Categories, Dublin Core, IMS Learning Objects Meta-data). The project validated the need for highly individualized content, the importance of individual faculty collections, the need for editorial interven- tion to supplement and modify contributed metadata, and the importance of addressing discipline-specific vocabularies and taxonomies.