A case study in designing Chinese metadata

Metadata are fundamental in establishing a digital library and museum while domain communities describe, interpret and manage different digital objects. Although many metadata formats and sets have been developed, it is difficult to choose an appropriate format and conversion is problematical, especially for the Chinese materials. This paper is a progress report from the Metadata Taskforce Group designing Chinese metadata for the digital library and museum project (DLMP) at Academia Sinica in Taiwan. The group’s top priority is to construct goals, principles and procedures while designing the metadata format for Chinese contents. Not only does the Metadata Taskforce Group present the analysis of content attributes of Formosan Plain indigenous people, but also several marked achievements and findings are suggested, such as the metadata record structure and criteria of selecting and evaluating the current metadata formats.