Unified Standard Metadata Format

Introduction

Achieving metadata interoperability among libraries becomes important to share metadata or information, and to work together. Some effort to achieve interoperability among libraries have researched by Library of Congress, Archive Ingest and Handling Test (AIHT), and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Hub and Spoke. However, their methods have limitations. Thus, as a uniformity approach, creating a new Unified Standard Metadata Model will be a global solution to share metadata or object materials of physical or digital libraries (Jin, 2011). It will be effective and efficient way rather than developing new skills or methods individually in each community.

The Unified Standard Metadata Schema (USMF) Purpose

The Unified Standard Metadata Model (USMM) created and developed with four significant purposes:

• to unite many kinds of metadata formats,
• to preserve metadata and object materials for a long term,
• to express relationships between original object materials and related object materials in detail, and
• to describe, understand, and treat metadata easily.

The Unified Standard Metadata Schema (USMF)

• It was developed to describe diverse object materials such as books, images, movies, etc.
• The developed USMF schem is in the link, USMF.xsd
• The developed USMF schem DTD is in the link, USMF.dtd
• The Unified Standard Metadata Model and Format Schema: Introduction, Primer and Reference Manual is the link, USMF Primer.

The Unified Standard Metadata Schema (USMF) Characteristics

• The most significant characteristic of the USMF is to have three type’s metadata: descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata type, at the same time. Thus, we can describe descriptive, administrative, and structural map in a metadata format, unlike the existing metadata formats.
• It was designed to embrace seven different metadata schemas: MARC, MODS, Simple DC, QDC, MIX, METS and SMPTE.
• The USMM has two big categories:
  • One is DescriptiveMetadata category, which has ‘objectIdentifier’, ‘objectCharacteristics’, and ‘objectLocationAndObjectExtra’ categories to describe descriptive metadata type for users and for search engines.
  • The other is ‘AdministrativeStructuralMetadata’ category, which has ‘objectRights’, ‘objectPreservation’, and ‘objectRelations’ categories, so that users and administrators can use information for object materials preservation.
• 'objectPreservation’ category in ‘AdministrativeStructuralMetadata’ is to describe preservation information for object materials themselves and metadata of object materials. The ‘objectPreservation’ category can describe ‘preservationDate,’ ‘fixty,’ ‘applicatedSoftware,’ ‘applicatedHardware,’ and ‘objectPreservationNote.’ Especially, ‘applicatedHardware’ may describe hardware which is used to make object materials digitize, such as scanner, digital camera, and VTR. Moreover, generalized ‘applicatedHardware’ section can be transferred from any elements of other metadata formats which are related to applied hardware.
• The ‘objectRelations’ category has ‘relatedobjectIdentifier,’ ‘relatedobjectCharacteristics,’ and ‘structuralRelationsOfRelatedObjects’ sections. In relatedobjectIdentifier’, we may give description about related items’ title, identifier Id, and so on, similar to ‘objectIdentifer’ in the ‘DescriptiveMetadata.’ By distinctive ‘structuralRelationsOfRelatedObjects,’ we may get a view related items with structural map along with ‘relatedobjectIdentifier’ and ‘relatedobjectCharacteristics.’
• Lastly, the special characteristic of USMF is ‘objectExtra’ section in ‘objectLocationAndObjectExtra’ in ‘DescriptiveMetadata.’ The ‘objectExtra’ section is to prepare the future desires which want to create new section in ‘DescriptiveMetadata.’ Thus, if we need one more section to describe descriptive metadata, we may create straightforwardly without altering main structure of USMM and USMF which looks like a fish.

USMF Project Activities

• Investigated existing interoperability problems in sharing information and working together.
• Suggested a solution, created and developed a new metadata schema, the Unified Standard Metadata Format (USMF) Schema.
• Published USMF on the web with XML schema definition language.
• Building a crosswalks from above seven schemas to CT
• Conduct to describe several diverse type objects with one of seven formats, and to convert them into new USMF schema.
• Created and developed effective the USMF conversion with Python programs- convert metadata described by Simple DC, QDC, MIX, MODS, METS or SMPTE metadata formats into the new Unified Standard Metadata Format (USMF) metadata.
• Created and documented the Unified Standard Metadata Model, USMF DTD, and the USMF Schema Introduction, Primer and Reference Manual.
• Designed and Developed the Metadata Digital Library.
• Designed and Developed the Unified Standard Metadata Format (USMF) metadata Generator.
• Working as a teaching assistant for ‘Foundations of Information Processing in LIS’ (Python) during Aug. 2008 through May 2012 helped a lot to accomplish those works in 2009.

Self Evaluation for the first project in GSLIS

It was fun and challenge the first project in GSLIS. Especially, the conversion program was the toughest one, because it was designed to transfer metadata of seven different metadata formats into the new designed USMF. While a conversion program usually transfers one to another schema (e.g., MARC to MODS, MARC to DC conversion of the Library of Congress), the program converts seven metadata formats into one metadata USMF at once. I realized it was not the best way to implement conversions, but, I count it as the very good first project experience at GSLIS.