6.6.3 Standards and Descriptive Metadata

6.6.3.1 Detailed, appropriate, organised metadata is the key to broad exposure and effective access. In Chapter 3 Metadata, a detailed discussion of metadata in many of its forms and requirements is undertaken, and this should be referred to in developing a delivery system. Ambitious access facilities, using, for example map interfaces or timelines, will only function if there is metadata to support it in a structured and organised form.

6.6.3.2  The most cost effective way to manage and create the appropriate metadata is to ensure the requirements for all the components in the delivery system are established prior to the ingest of the content. In this way the metadata creation steps can be built into the pre-ingest and ingest workflows. The cost of creating a minimal set, as discussed in Section 7.4, is the extra task of adding and structuring the metadata in a system which has already been created.