Digital collection management software employed by libraries and museums: examination of metadata semantic mapping functionality

A growing number of organizations are building digital collections using both commercial digital collection management software such as CONTENTdm, Encompass, etc., and open source software such as Greenstone and D-Space. This rapidly growing number of distributed digital collections has brought to the fore the critical issues of resource discovery and sharing across these collections. The goal of this project is to examine the functionality of metadata creation and mapping and the configuration of digital collection management software. This goal relates to the issue of semantic interoperability of concept representation across digital collections. For this, this project aims at examining how digital collection management software provides a mechanism for semantic mapping either between different metadata schemes such as Dublin Core (DC) and MARC or between cataloger-defined field names and a given metadata scheme such as DC. As a first step, we will examine features related to metadata semantic mapping of CONTENTdm software, which provides a feature that allows for catalogers to map cataloger-defined field names onto DC metadata elements