Metadata for conservators: Overcoming obstacles to digitising conservation documentation

Abstract

Conservation documentation plays an essential role in the long-term preservation of cultural property, and conservators are ethically responsible for keeping permanent and accessible records. While the conservation profession has been slow to digitise legacy documentation, Stanford Libraries Conservation Services began a process of regularly accessioning its conservation records to the university’s digital repository in 2018. To determine strategies for the effective cataloguing of accessioned conservation records, internal search needs were assessed to develop a metadata profile based on the MODS standard. This paper describes mappings from Stanford Libraries conservation data to MODS and Dublin Core elements, enumerates useful controlled vocabularies for describing conservation documentation in repository metadata and examines the potential benefits of descriptive metadata profiles to the conservation profession.