from 9 libraries, mostly scanned in high resolution TIFF format, and reproduced also in the derivative format
JPEG for the internet fruition; 362 PhD thesis coming from the Physics’ library provided in pdf format; and 3
ancient maps coming from the Architecture library.
About the material used at the beginning of project, it is important to underline three influencing aspects on the
building of digital resources conforming with OAIS IP structure :
• the descriptive metadata provided with the material were provided in both standard description (bibliographic
description coded in ISO2709) and non-standard description. The non-standardized descriptions were usually
structured into local databases or spreadsheets often not normalized;
• no other metadata then the descriptive metadata about the intellectual content were provided with digital objects;
• no controlled vocabularies were shared by the heterogeneous material;
• the digital objects were multi-formats, differently structured, and differently related to the descriptive metadata,
and in many cases not consistently.
Consequently, it was necessary to identify, normalize, classify, organize, enrich, and package the incoming metadata
and objects into a consistent set of digital objects and metadata related to them. The package had to be structured
and coded in the standards adopted, and profiled by designing specific content models, shared by both partners for
conveying information about resources and for applying the relevant services. The standards adopted for SDL are:
• Metadata Objects Description Standard (MODS) for describing the intellectual contents;
• PREservation Metadata Implementation Strategies (PREMIS) (http://www.loc.gov/standards/premis/)
for managing preservation metadata;
• Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) (http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/) for packaging
metadata belonging to the digital resource.