A Methodology for Sharing Archival Descriptive Metadata in a Distributed Environment

摘要

This paper discusses how to exploit widely accepted solutions for interoperation, such as the pair Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) and Dublin Core (DC) metadata format, in order to deal with the peculiar features of archival description metadata and allow their sharing. We present a methodology for mapping Encoded Archival Description (EAD) metadata into Dublin Core (DC) metadata records without losing information. The methodology exploits Digital Library System (DLS) technologies enhancing archival metadata sharing possibilities and at the same time considers archival needs; furthermore, it permits to open valuable information resources held by archives to the wider context of the cross-domain interoperation among different cultural heritage institutions.