Retaining Metadata in Remixed Cultural Heritage Objects

Abstract

Increasingly, cultural heritage institutions have been working to incorporate features into their collections and websites that empower users to take ownership of cultural narratives. Annotation tools, crowd-sourced tagging, and greater social media presences are characteristic of libraries, archives, and museums. Some institutions have begun to offer digital content to patrons that they are encouraged to remix. Endorsement of remixing as a way of engaging with cultural heritage material requires a metadata infrastructure that can support description of remixed content in a way that is comprehensive, interoperable, and scalable. The movement towards enabling remixes of cultural heritage materials threatens existing metadata models because it requires systemic change in the granularity of descriptive metadata and in metadata creation workflows. This poster analyzes the viability of employing the existing MODS and Dublin Core standards to create descriptive metadata for remixed content.