Perhaps the most daunting challenge to generating fully reusable data products is less about technology and more about generating complete and unambiguous contextualization of a data collection. This challenge has motivated library scientists for millennia, i.e. for as long as humans have decided they wanted to collect stuff and be able to find it again to reuse it. The need for standards in curatorial practice is especially important when the person who wants to reuse the stuff is different and perhaps separated by a lifetime from the person who originally collected the stuff. The organization of effective metadata can vary widely depending on the nature of the data and its use cases. However, the DublinCore standard (ISO 15836) provides the basic abstractions defining the contextual metadata that is typically critical to the reuse of a curated collection long after its original assembly, regardless of the nature of the collection.

Review of module objectives

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