National Library of Australia  - Gateways

ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 72 | December 2004


Kinetica Launches New Guidelines for Contributing Metadata

The trend towards online publishing which began in the 1990s has gathered momentum in the last few years. Kinetica has increasingly obtained records for online publications, for example over half of the new titles for government publications added to the National Bibliographic Database in 2003 consisted of digital materials.

Providing metadata for electronically published works allows the public to find publications regardless of their format. Metadata is simply ‘data about data’—data in a structured format which describes an electronic resource. Metadata is a shareable national resource which facilitates direct access to publications across the national information infrastructure through its creation, use, storage and sharing.

New guidelines have been published by Kinetica with the assistance and/or cooperation of the National Archives of Australia, Australian Government Information Management Office and participants in the Government Metadata Pilot Project. These guidelines will help creators of Australian electronic resources in the government, academic and commercial sectors share their metadata for inclusion in the National Bibliographic Database and other resource discovery services.
 
The guidelines cover the scope of a publication; how to contribute metadata; metadata requirements; and access to online publications. Guidelines for Contributing Metadata to the National Library of Australia for Resource Discovery is available on the web via a link from the Kinetica Cataloguing Service page at: <www.nla.gov.au/kinetica/cataloguing.html>.
—Roxanne Missingham, Assistant Director-General, Resource Sharing

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