Metadata Management in Islandora

A digital object does not have any meaning to a human being unless the content is described with descriptive, structural and technical (or administrative) metadata. The costs of producing maintaining and transforming metadata have been prohibitive, and cataloguing traditionally often required substantial time spent in repetitive tasks of duplication, which increased the risk of introducing errors. Programmatic, XML-based metadata and XML-metadata tools have promised those maintaining digital databases and datastores of metadata better ways of creating, updating, managing, and transforming metadata.

Islandora aims to simplify the process of creating, updating, and indexing XML-based metadata for storage in a Fedora repository. The proposed presentation will provide an update on metadata-related tools in Islandora, particularly in Islandora 7 (compatible with Drupal 7). In this most recent version, descriptive metadata forms based on any XML schema can be created and edited using the Form Builder; technical metadata can automatically extracted from objects on ingest using FITS; and administrative metadata emerging from ingest processes using microservices can be written to Fedora’s native “AUDIT” datastream. Islandora builds on the value and features of core Fedora, including the ability to version datastreams, and review versions in the interface.