“Contentless” Digital Collections

Abstract

Generally, when we think of a digital collection or repository, we think of digital images, ebooks, audio and video files. But some important digital collections, such a bibliographies, don’t have content per se but consist of metadata describing a physical object such as a book, a digital object such as an audio recording or an event such as an opera performance. Not surprisingly, this kind of “contentless” digital object is dependent on metadata to describe it. And while we have standards for bibliographic entries in books and articles, we need more complex metadata for digital bibliographic entries. For the past several months, the Library Technology Software Development group has been working on exactly how to represent these contentless digital objects in our Fedora digital repository using the Hydra based software development environment. Using The Televised Opera and Musical Comedy Database as a sample, we will discuss the work we have done to create a general bibliographic tool for the Fedora Digital Repository.