What information should I record?

This resource, from Culture24, states – Your collections management system hopefully has the information you need to manage and make sense of the physical items you plan to digitise. Even if your collections data is good, you may need to enhance it, for example, by writing short captions for a particular use or adding keywords to help users find what they are looking for. When making digital copies of items, you also need to record further information specific to the reproduction process.

Managing the information that gives your collections meaning, not as an end in itself but to record and retrieve what is known about your objects. Most museums create some kind of structured catalogue record for each object, or group of objects, either on computer or cards. Such records give an at-a-glance summary of key facts and they can be indexed so you can find information when you need it.

CDWA is a set of guidelines for the description of art, architecture, and other cultural works. It represents common practice and advises best practice for cataloguing, based on surveys and consensus building with the user community. It is arranged in a framework to which existing art information data structures may be mapped and new data modelling may be referenced.

Making sure you have the basic information to be accountable for the objects in your care, and tackling the backlog if you do not. Use this procedure to check you have the basic information to be accountable for the objects in your care. 

This standard provides general guidance for the preparation of archival descriptions. It is to be used in conjunction with existing national standards or as the basis for the development of national standards.

Encoded Archival Description (EAD) is an XML standard for encoding archival finding aids.

MARC is a standard designed to be a carrier for bibliographic information about printed and manuscript textual materials, computer files, maps, music, continuing resources, visual materials, and mixed materials. MARC 21 is the current version.

The Europeana Publishing Framework makes it easy for Europeana’s data partners to see how the quality of the metadata and content they provide affects how Europeana can surface, showcase and promote it on Europeana Collections and beyond, and how others can view it, share it and work with it.

The Europeana Data Model (EDM) is a RDF standard for structuring the data that Europeana ingests, manages and publishes.

This resource provides an overview of metadata, including its types, roles, and characteristics; a discussion of metadata as it relates to web resources; and a description of methods, tools, standards, and protocols for publishing and disseminating digital collections.

The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set is a small set of vocabulary terms that can be used to describe digital resources (video, images, web pages, etc.), as well as physical resources such as books or CDs, and objects like artworks.

LIDO is an XML harvesting schema. The schema is intended for delivering metadata, for use in a variety of online services, from an organization’s online collections database to portals of aggregated resources, as well as exposing, sharing and connecting data on the web. It is not intended to be used as a basis for a collection management system or to support loan and acquisition activities.

An extension of Dublin Core for biology, and especially biodiversity, data. It defines a set of terms that are used to retain meaning as data is shared across different platforms.

METS is an XML schema for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding items within a digital library.

METS is an XML schema for a bibliographic element set may be used for a variety of purposes, and particularly for library applications.