Creating Metadata Best Practices for Digital Audiovisual Resources

The University of Illinois Library is in the process of creating new and updated metadata best practices documentation for digital audiovisual (A/V) resources to augment guidelines established in 2007. The goal has been to create documentation that is simple enough to provide general guidelines to the entire campus community while ensuring the integrity of the metadata submitted with A/V resources to the library that work for both the access and the preservation of resources created and purchased by the campus. The library underwent a research phase that spanned a period of several months, interviewing stakeholders and surveying the current state of the art in the broader metadata landscape. After the research phase, it was decided to limit the scope of the recommendations to a set of required and optional metadata elements only, leaving the choice of schema selection to the ingesting repository systems. However, recommendations for potential schemas have also been included for reference. Further recommendations have been made for automated metadata extraction tools such as MediaInfo and Jhove that will increase the level of metadata uniformity in the digital A/V resources currently being created and managed by the campus, while facilitating submission to the library's preservation repository. This paper will outline the findings from the research phase and share the new and updated library's Digital A/V Metadata Best Practices.