Development & Implementation Plan
OAIS
Current System
Metadata
Interaction with System

Metadata plays a fundamental and important role in DAMS. Metadata provides the clues necessary to manage, access, preserve, and relate digital files. Metadata, however, while simplistically defined as "information about information," actually becomes information itself and eventually can posses it’s own metadata. The extensible and dynamic nature of metadata can soon lead to a situation in which managing metadata can equal or surpass the task of managing the original digital asset. DLSD is developing a entity relationship data model for a system that will handle metadata across digital collections to provide the most functional and extensible metadata management system possible. This system, named the Metadata Registry, is a fundamental element of DAMS. It is comprised of a database to retain, manage, and relate metadata for dynamic search and discovery. The data model is an application of research in information theory and practical metadata experience to UT Austin’s specific circumstances. DLSD is developing a data model that requires minimal metadata for essential management purposes, but has the capacity to accommodate domain specific metadata. This functionality is essential for accommodating the academic area metadata sets for different disciplines, i.e., museum metadata may differ greatly from medical science metadata sets. Additionally, digital information objects are by their very nature extensible. Concurrently, metadata about those digital objects must accommodate this extensibility. The use of digital assets over time will produce valuable information explaining how the digital assets were used. The ability to capture this life cycle information will be explored at a later point in the development of the Metadata registry.

DLSD’s entity relationship data model for the DAMS Metadata Registry is an adaptation of two approaches to metadata. The first produced by the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) centers on the different forms an intellectual work can assume. The second is a concept developed as part of the Harmony project and raises relationships of intellectual to the status of independent entities. More information is available on the initial research behind DLSD's entity relationship data model.

Related resources:

IFLA Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (HTML)
IFLA Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (pdf)
OCLC examination of FRBR-A Case Study: The FRBRization of Humphry Clinker
Toward a Theory of Information Preservation
FEDORA at the University of Virginia
Publications by Carl Lagoze at Cornell University
An Event-Aware Model for Metadata Interoperability (pdf)