It is difficult to provide all relevant metadata for the archival material without having spent more time with the poet's fonds. Still, I feel the categories provided by Dublin Core are highly applicable to archival material. I can foresee trouble with the "agents" field however. Photographs may have unidentified creators, or I may have to cross-reference other materials in order to find out who the creators were. Even in the case of the "photoshoot" image, there was no identified photographer, although Brown did provide the name of the studio where the images were developed. I'm still not clear on where the creation of the digitized version is annotated. Should the information that relates to the digitization process go in the "Contributor" field? Perhaps the process of digitizing doesn't change the content of the resource so much as the form, however certainly form shapes a reader's encounter of the content to some extent. So, does metadata describe the original content or the changing form? Perhaps I'm not yet familiar enough with Dublin Core, but there doesn't seem to be a field to represent the method by which media shifts take place.

The Metadata of a Digital Archive
Lingering Questions

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Author: Jana Millar Usiskin
Word Count: 198

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