Metadata‐based access to multimedia architectural and historical archive collections: a review

This review is a summary of the state‐of‐the‐art for those who have not been intimately dealing with the evolution of digital archives. At the same time this survey will be a useful resource and starting point for archivists, librarians and technicians, who are becoming involved in institutional digitization projects. It presents a brief overview of what is meant by a digital library and a digital archive, and how archival collections can be described. It expresses briefly the different approaches to collections and their descriptions and suggests that a consistent approach to descriptions at collection and item level is an important factor in initiatives which seek to provide integrated access to distributed resources, whether those resources are traditional or digital.