I am a strong believer in the sharing and interoperability of metadata, therefore I am trying to advocate descriptive standards both regarding syntax of elements and their content. I decided to use controlled vocabularies for my collection; most of them are well-established and time-tested within the cultural and heritage institutions, such as Thesaurus for Graphic Materials, Library of Congress Subject Headings. However, for the style element, which is a VRA-inspired extension of the DCTerms set I use a local short list that was prepared for the collection.
It is not only subject headings that I try to control in order to minimize errors and typos, in all tested applications I tried to come up with a drop-down menu for languages used within my collection, because terms like Yiddish or Lithuanian can cause difficulties even to experienced catalogers.
In order to make the retrieval of metadata functional and effective I try to keep values of metadata fields simple and relatively short, so that the data would display properly and did not conflict with layout of the page. Shorter entries are also easier for users to scan on the result screen.
One of the difficulties I have to face is that the collection is relatively small and thematically dispersed, so it is relatively difficult to come up with a good browsing categories, therefore I tried to choose broader access terms rather than specific ones.
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