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Metadata for Digital Collections: A How-to-Do-It Manual. By Steven J. Miller. New York: Neal-Schuman, 2011. 343p. $78.00 softcover (ISBN 978-1-5557-0746-0). How-to-Do-It Manuals.
The rapidly developing digital libran' environment continues to present many challenges, not only to those who are just beginning to dabble in digital library initiatives, but also to those with experience. Metadata for Digital Collections is an excellent addition to the growing literature addressing this topic. The author, Steven Miller, is an experienced cataloger and cataloging department manager. This experience, combined with his position teaching courses in metadata, cataloging, and information architecture at the University of WisconsinMilwaukee School of Information Studies, makes him ideally suited to address the development and application of metadata to digital collections.
Metadata for Digital Collections is organized into eleven chapters that cover all aspects of creating metadata in a digital library setting. The first chapter begins with the basics: defining metadata, describing types of metadata applied to digital collections, and introducing the reader to metadata standards. Several definitions of metadata are provided and, taken together, they illustrate for the reader how diverse our understanding of metadata can be. Chapter 2 discusses the foundations of resource description, and because of its ubiquity, introduces the Dublin Core (DC) metadata element set. Although prior cataloging knowledge would help the...