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 different 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 intervention to supplement and modify contributed metadata, and the importance of addressing discipline-specific vocabularies and taxonomies.