Had a real interesting experience in my Metadata class tonight, as we all made our pitches for why the elements assigned to us should be considered and utilized for the collection. Date, my element, which can cover a wide variety of temporal information related to an object, as discussed in an earlier post, made the cut...as did most of the elements. The notable castaways included Contributor, for which a strong case just could not be made for inclusion, as well as Language. These will likely be replaced by elements covering identification of the responsible indexing or entry person for the metadata, as well as one considering the football players likely to be found in the Bama football images we are describing.
It was intriguing to hear the wide variety of justifications and possible uses for elements provided by my classmates, and was an excellent opportunity to think critically about the importance of specific elements to the description of digital collections. I also found it challenging to consider the ways in considering the employment of elements when using digitized objects versus ones that are born digital, and how that distinction can alter the usefulness of those elements. This has been a very educational project so far, and we're just getting started on it. More to come as we get further along.
It was interesting to hear what you and our colleagues had to say about this one. I find that there is a bit of overlap with the inclusion of date, for example in coverage (with regard to the temporal); perhaps even subject; and rights, definitely for copyright issues.
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