Metadata for Digital Images

Page Index

• Introduction

Introduction

Metadata for Digital Images is of two types: Administrative and Descriptive.

Administrative Metadata consists of information about the acquisition, access restrictions, provenance, preservation and treatment decisions for a digital image.

Descriptive Metadata, also called intellectual or access metadata, supports discovery and identification of the images for users or researchers. Title, creator, scanner, date of creation, etc. are examples of descriptive metadata.

Metadata should be embedded in the object and the elements should be listed in the process manual. Ideally, the following fields must be included in the cataloging:

• Cataloging information about the original object (i.e. title, creator, date, original location of object, medium).
• Indexing information as needed. The index should be a list of keywords which can be used to identify the object in a variety of ways, in order to make the image database more searchable. For instance, keywords for a painting of a river may be "bridge", "Thames River", "boat", or "Impressionism".
• Date scanned
• Resolution that the image was scanned at
• Type of scanner
• Name or initials of scanning personnel