12-13 May 2003

Location: Linder Theater, the American Museum of Natural History

Purpose: Open to participants from RLG member institutions and CIMI sponsoring institutions, this 1-1/2-day forum presented standards and metadata issues in a unique format aimed at demystifying a bewildering field of promise and practice. Speakers covered a wide range of standards applicable to cultural heritage institutions—from item- to collection-level descriptive standards, from digital preservation to emerging multimedia specifications. Day 1, "Metadata on Your Sleeve—Description and Discovery," focused exclusively on descriptive metadata strategies. Day 2, "Metadata in your Pocket—Management and Delivery," focused on the less developed area of structural and administrative metadata.

The Ready To Wear agenda classified standards in a way to help speakers and attendees think and talk about different kinds of metadata initiatives in a new, concise and intuitive fashion. Standards that help you investigate a topic without specifying an implementation were covered in the section on "Investigating: reference models & frameworks." Other standards zero in on the nitty-gritty of practice by describing how to choose or coin values for a data field; "Naming: data value & content" sessions were devoted to these. Standards that help you encode data for sharing (including XML standards for data exchange and integration) were examined in "Sharing: data structures."

This event was the latest in a series of collaborations between RLG and CIMI.

• Meeting highlights

Day 1: Metadata on Your Sleeve—Description and Discovery

	Introduction: what were we thinking? [PDF] [PowerPoint presentation] —Günter Waibel, RLG
	Investigating: reference models & framework "CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR)"  [PDF] [PowerPoint presentation] —Tony Gill, ARTstor
	Naming: data value & content "Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR), Getty Vocabularies, LoC Vocabularies"  [PDF] [PowerPoint presentation] —Sherman Clarke, New York University
	Sharing: data structure I (libraries & archives) "Encoded Archival Description (EAD), Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) Collection Description Schema, Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS)"  [PDF] [PowerPoint presentation] —Merrilee Proffitt, RLG
.	Sharing: data structure II (museums & visual resource community) "Visual Resource Association Core 3.0 (VRA), mda SPECTRUM / CIMI XML Schema for SPECTRUM, Dublin Core (DC)" [PDF] [PowerPoint presentation] —John Perkins, CIMI
	"Mixing & Matching"  [PDF] [PowerPoint presentation] —Günter Waibel, RLG

Day 2: Metadata in your Pocket—Management and Delivery

	Introduction —John Perkins, CIMI
	Investigating: reference models & frameworks "Open Archival Information System (OAIS), Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG 7, MPEG 21)"  [PDF] [PowerPoint presentation] —Ronald Murray, Library of Congress
	Naming: data value & content "Format Registries"  [PDF] [PowerPoint presentation] —Stephen Abrams, Harvard University
	Sharing: data structure "Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG 2000), NISO Metadata for Images in XML Schema (MIX) / NISO Technical Metadata for Digital Still Images (NISO Z39.87), Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS)"  [PDF] [PowerPoint presentation] —Robin Dale, RLG