Towards a sound management of digital culture. Metadata schemes and application profiles for digital repositories

摘要

If we give a look to the present panorama of digital research – particularly if applied to culturalheritage collections - we have to admit that there is still more attention to the quality of data than to thenecessary series of management activities, extended to the long-time preservation of what was created (oftenspending a lot of money). Cultural heritage digital collections have to be considered in any sense digitallibraries, even if they are not conceived to be delivered to web users. To manage the life-cycle management ofdigital libraries administrative and preservation metadata are widely considered to represent an essential tool.On this attention to metadata management should be based the distinction between projects oriented to the mereproduction of data and those oriented to service delivery (for closed or open communities). A short survey onmetadata landscape is proposed, putting in evidence their advantages and issues, with respect to efficiency tointer-operate, manage and preserve what we can define the artifacts of our digital culture. The paper closes withan in-depth presentation of Italian experience, in particular with the MAG metadata application profile and itsapplications.