Describing a visual universe: (Re)building consistent metadata standards for online photography collections

Nowhere is the impact of visual culture more evident than in cultural heritage institutions. Images in library, museum, and archival collections are drawing increased attention from online and onsite patrons. As a result, user requests for visual resources are also on the rise, putting added pressure on the staff whose job it is to identify, retrieve and reproduce these materials. This paper explores how Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book &; Manuscript Library is enabling deeper and more efficient access to its highuse photography collections by rethinking its descriptive metadata practices for visual resources, an effort given shape during a project to improve access to the William Gedney photographs collection. Using standard metadata element sets, controlled vocabularies and limited free-text fields within a consistent structural framework, the library is generating descriptive data that can be reused locally and are interoperable with international schema and content standards, ensuring that its datasets remain viable as part of future developments in shared and linked data.