Arts and Humanities

Standards Add

Encoded Archival Description (EAD) Edit

A standard for encoding archival finding aids using XML in archival and manuscript repositories, implementing the recommendations of the International Council on Archives ISAD(G): General International Standard Archival Description.

TEI - Text Encoding Initiative Edit

The guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative make recommendations about suitable ways of representing those features of textual resources which need to be identified explicitly in order to facilitate processing by computer programs. They specify a set of XML tags in order to mark the textual metadata, text structure, relationship between images and transcriptions and other features of interest. The guidelines both describe the formal TEI encoding scheme, and document the TEI markup vocabulary. In their 30 years community driven development they have developed to a de-facto standard in the production of textual data in the humanities.

DDI (Data Documentation Initiative) Edit

A widely used, international standard for describing data from the social, behavioral, and economic sciences. Two versions of the standard are currently maintained in parallel:

  • DDI Codebook (or DDI version 2) is the simpler of the two, and intended for documenting simple survey data for exchange or archiving. Version 2.5 was released in January 2014.
  • DDI Lifecycle (or DDI version 3) is richer and may be used to document datasets at each stage of their lifecycle from conceptualization through to publication and reuse. It is modular and extensible. Version 3.2 was published in March 2014.

Both versions are XML-based and defined using XML Schemas. They were developed and are maintained by the DDI Alliance.

MARC (Machine-Readable Cataloging) Edit

MARC is a standard and serialization format for representing bibliographic metadata, originally designed as a way of exchanging bibliographic records between library catalogs. Various different versions have been defined, mostly with national or regional scope, of which MARC 21 is probably the most widely used. There also exists an XML serialization of MARC 21, known as MARCXML.

MIDAS-Heritage Edit

A British cultural heritage standard for recording information on buildings, archaeological sites, shipwrecks, parks and gardens, battlefields, areas of interest and artefacts.

Sponsored by the Forum on Information Standards in Heritage, MIDAS Version 1.1 was released in October 2012.

OAI-ORE (Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange) Edit

The goal of these standards is to expose the rich content in aggregations of Web resources to applications that support authoring, deposit, exchange, visualization, reuse, and preservation. The standards support the changing nature of scholarship and scholarly communication, and the need for cyberinfrastructure to support that scholarship, with the intent to develop standards that generalize across all web-based information including the increasing popular social networks of “Web 2.0”.

RO-Crate Edit

RO-Crate is a community effort to establish a lightweight approach to packaging research data with their metadata. It is based on schema.org annotations in JSON-LD, and aims to make best-practice in formal metadata description accessible and practical for use in a wider variety of situations, from an individual researcher working with a folder of data, to large data-intensive computational research environments.

Extensions Add

CARARE metadata schema Edit

An application profile of the MIDAS Heritage standard intended for delivering metadata to the CARARE service environment about an organisation’s online collections, monument inventory database and digital objects.

Tools Add

FISH Interoperability Toolkit Edit

A suite of tools using the MIDAS Heritage metadata standard to facilitate the process of moving information between the wide variety of information systems used to record the historic environment.

Use Cases Add

The Digital Repository of Ireland Edit

Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) is a national trusted digital repository (TDR) for Ireland’s social and cultural data. The Repository supports records catalogued in four different metadata standards: Dublin Core, EAD, MARC XML and MODS.

The Centre for Digital Music Research Data Repository Edit

Used by researchers at C4DM to share their research data with their colleagues and others in the digital music research community, this repository uses the DataCite metadata schema to describe its holdings.

English Heritage Listed Buildings System Edit

A case study of the use of the MIDAS XML Monument schema as a vehicle for storing data exported from a major heritage sector information system, the English Heritage Listed Building System (LBS).

ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research) Edit

A data archive providing leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community; all metadata conforms to the DDI standard.

The Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) Data Archive Edit

Provides members of the scholarly community with access to files associated with scholarly studies for the purpose of replication, for all studies conducted by ISPS-affiliated researchers. ISPS metadata records conform to DDI requirements and include a minimal set of Dublin Core metadata elements.

UK ADS - UK Archeology Data Service Edit

The ADS collects, catalogues, manages, preserves, and encourages re-use of digital resources created by archaeologists. It promotes good practice in the use of digital data in archaeology, provides technical advice to the research community, and supports the deployment of digital technologies. Its catalogue records are based on Dublin Core.

UKDA (UK Data Archive) Edit

Curator of the largest collection of digital data in the social sciences and humanities in the United Kingdom, the archive uses DDI as the basis for its catalogue records.