Metadata Guidelines

Metadata plays a pivotal role in the efficient organization, discovery, and preservation of our extensive digital resources for the Texas State University Libraries. Our commitment to staying at the forefront of metadata standards, both nationally and internationally, ensures that our digital repositories and collections remain accessible and searchable to increase their availability and impact to the research community.

This guide gives an overview of the guidelines for records in the University Libraries digital repositories collections.

The primary goal when we create metadata for the University Libraries digital repositories and collections is to help users find items that they will find interesting or useful. We do this by:

• Describing an item as accurately as possible (e.g., not describing a clipping as a whole newspaper, or using a title that only applies to part of the content).
• Including any information that is relevant to explain what the item is.
• Limiting duplication of information, unless is serves a purpose.
• Following formatting and usage guidelines so that information matches across items.

If you come across an item that seems to have an error, are working on metadata and discover you have questions, or find a different kind of item and are unsure of how best to describe it in the metadata, feel free to contact us: UL-RDS@txstate.edu