Increased digitization coupled with growing interest in the management of born-digital Sound and Audiovisual resources has heightened the awareness of content managers and curators to the importance of creating quality metadata for their resources. Proper collection curation starts with quality, and information-rich, metadata. Although there are several community driven best practices and metadata schemes for different purposes (descriptive, technical, administrative, and preservation), adapting and using existing guidelines can be challenging to many, especially as Sound and Audiovisual resources require specific attention to various unique metadata aspects.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Library created metadata best practices for audiovisual resources in 2007 in conjunction with its large-scale digitization efforts. However, many users who work with audiovisual resources on campus found it difficult to use in actual practice. Since the end of 2013, in order to make the metadata best practices more user friendly and content rich to the point where content managers can actually ‘use’ it to effectively describe their works, the UIUC Library has been reviewing its current best practices documentation along with those of several other institutions in a bid to create a new, more user-friendly, best practice resource.
This presentation will share our findings of common characteristics from audiovisual metadata best practices and guidelines widely used in the community and introduce the UIUC Library's newly created metadata best practices for audiovisual resources, including tools and techniques that would help content managers capture rich metadata that ultimately support curation of digital audiovisual collections.