ADL Collection Metadata
ADL collection metadata is a content standard and XML representation for collection-level metadata, i.e., metadata that describes an entire collection of items. It captures three classes of information about a collection: 1) basic, contextualizing attributes of the collection such as its responsible party, scope and purpose, and terms and conditions; 2) statistics such as the number of items in the collection, both overall and broken down by type and format, and the geospatial and temporal distributions of the items; and 3) structural and functional information such as the vocabularies and metadata mappings employed by the collection and the search services it supports. An XML DTD for the content standard that includes human-readable documentation can be found at...
The CLaM (Collection-Level Metadata) software package dynamically gathers collection statistics by performing queries against a relational database; manages other, relatively static metadata in RCS-controlled files; and renders collection metadata into HTML pages containing inline GIF images. The package is Unix-specific (it's been ported to Solaris and DEC Alpha Unix), is written in C, C++, Perl, AWK, and csh, and relies on 3rd-party software such as NetPBM and Gnuplot. Metadata generation and installation workflows are automated by GNU makefiles. It is compatible with any database that provides a command-line query interface. Per-collection configuration consists of writing a handful of SQL queries and AWK scripts.
Here are some examples of ADL collection metadata:
| Collection | Format | |
|---|---|---|
| ADL Catalog | XML | HTML |
| ADL Gazetteer | XML | HTML |
| ESSW AVHRR | XML | HTML |
| UCSB SPOT Catalog | XML | HTML |
Relevant literature: 
Collection Metadata Solutions
for Digital Library Applications. Linda L. Hill, Greg
Janée, Ron Dolin, James Frew, and Mary Larsgaard (1999).
Journal of the American Society for Information Science
(JASIS) 50(13) (November 1999): 1169-1181.
last modified 2009-01-12 19:49