Towards a sound management of digital culture. Metadata schemes and application profiles for digital repositories

If we give a look to the present panorama of digital research – particularly if applied to cultural heritage collections - we have to admit that there is still more attention to the quality of data than to the necessary series of management activities, extended to the long-time preservation of what was created (often spending a lot of money). Cultural heritage digital collections have to be considered in any sense digital libraries, even if they are not conceived to be delivered to web users. To manage the life-cycle management of digital libraries administrative and preservation metadata are widely considered to represent an essential tool. On this attention to metadata management should be based the distinction between projects oriented to the mere production of data and those oriented to service delivery (for closed or open communities). A short survey on metadata landscape is proposed, putting in evidence their advantages and issues, with respect to efficiency to inter-operate, manage and preserve what we can define the artifacts of our digital culture. The paper closes with an in-depth presentation of Italian experience, in particular with the MAG metadata application profile and its applications