Metadata Decisions for Digital Libraries: A Survey Report

A survey on metadata conducted at the end of 2007 received over 400 answers from 49 countries all over the world. It helped the authors to identify major issues and concerns regarding metadata that should be addressed in the IFLA Guidelines for Digital Libraries. The questionnaire included a question of the roles respondents may have, and five questions of the major concerns in any project that relates to metadata, regarding design and planning of digital projects, element set standards, data contents in a record, authority files and controlled vocabularies, and metadata encoding. Findings from the survey are reported and a workflow chart is included in this paper.