Organization Monkey

i’ve been working on an article that is meant to guide digital collection developers to consider particular aspects of how he/she intends the collection to be used, in order to choose an appropriate metadata schema.  i’ve seen in real life, and heard stories about, how a collection gets rolling, gets digitized, and then gets to the metadata stage without a real plan of which elements are important.  the guide is a series of nine questions to help the developer consider practical things, like, “who is your user?”  clarifying potential users (and uses) of a digital collection will guide a developer to identify key elements that the user will employ in a search of the collection, and those elements can play a dominant role in the schema that is ultimately chosen.  an example: if the collection is designed for history majors, who are very concerned about when things happened, it would be appropriate to include at least one date element in the schema, with a standardized way of entering the date information.

so, all you metadata experts out there, is there any one aspect of schema creation that you think a collection developer has to identify before choosing a schema?  leave a comment.