Collection Guidelines and Standards

The creation of digital collections for long-term access often involves a wide range of digital formats, standards and technologies. Using these to create good digital collections is no simple matter and requires specialist knowledge and skills.

Hence, to assist depostors to Demetrius, we provide here an overview of some of the major components and activities involved in the creation of digital resources, and a guidelines for identifying, organizing, and applying existing knowledge and resources to support the development of good digital collections.

These guidelines are organized around indicators of 'goodness' for four core entities:

• Collections (organized groups of Items)
• Items (digital resources)
• Metadata (information related to Items)
• Projects (initiatives to create or manage Collections)

For each of these four entities, general principles related to quality are defined and discussed, and supporting resources providing further information are identified. These resources may be standards, guidelines, best practices, explanations, discussions, clearinghouses, case studies, or examples.

The criteria for 'good' collections, and associated information, is adapted from 'A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections', published by the National Information Standards Office (NISO).