The Design of Metadata Schemas for Chinese Cultural Celebrities' Manuscript Library

Metadata is essential to the semantic discovery of a digital library. A lot of metadata standards have been issued in recent years , but few standards or guidelines are actually implemented . Practitioners are always suffering from no guidelines or pilot projects can be referenced when developing digital library applications. The situation does no good to overcome interoperability problems between applications. This paper summarized the design of metadata schem as for Chinese Cultural Celebrities’ Manuscript Library (CCCML), which is a branch of Shanghai Library. In practicing a formalized and normalized way to implement the merits of metadata for CCCML, and overcome the confusion of using metadata, we experienced an approach in deriving a set of principles, delivering an outline of methodology, conducting a procedure for the practice, and developing the specification of the schemas, as well as the implementation of the schemas in the CCCML digital library system.