digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

I've been looking for element sets defining resource-level (not collection-level) administrative metadata and have been coming up empty handed. METS contains generic elements (<techMD>, <rightsMD>, <sourceMD> and <digiprovMD>) that are intended to either point to external administrative metadata or to encapsulate elements from some external schema. The PREMIS data dictionary supplies a detailed preservation metadata elemet set, but only refers to administrative metadata incidentally. Several obsolete or deprecated admin metadata element sets exist, such as the one from Library of Congress' Core Metadata Elements project from 1998, and from the Making of America 2 project (documented in this CLIR report). The most detailed current element set I could find is the University of Virginia Library's UVa AdminMeta, which at least in its DTD tree view appears comprehensive and applicable to a variety of workflows and content types, but also appears specific to a particular institution (albeit a significant player in digital libraries).

What I am looking for, or if it doesn't exist I am suggesting be developed, is the equivalent of the data dictionary from the Digital Library Federation's ERM (electonic resource management) specification. However, instead of aiding in the management of digital content licensed by libraries, the element set I am describing would aid in the management of digital content being created by libraries, and would do so such that the metadata could be shared across institutions, submitted to trusted digital repositories as part of preservation metadata (think OAIS SIPs), and used for other purposes where the benefits of standardization would be realized.

Schemas for specific types of technical metadata are emerging, the best known of which is NISO Z39.87 - Technical Metadata for Digital Still Images (currently still in ballot), and this type of metadata is certainly an important part of the broader administrative metadata that should be created in a digital library production (and mangement) environment, but as far as I know there is nothing comprehensive and general out there at this time. I would love to hear about potentially useful standards of this nature that I have overlooked.