Mapping, cross-walking, converting and exchanging Oceanographic metadata information in Video Data Management System

The NOAA Central Library (NCL) has been collaborating with the Office of Ocean Exploration and Research (OER), and two divisions of the National Occanographic Data Center (NODC) — the Marine Data Stewardship Division (MDSD) and the National Coastal Data Development Center (NCDDC) — to address the requirements for metadata usage, archiving, preserving, managing, and providing online access to digital videos and still images from OER oceanographic expeditions. The Video Data Management System (VDMS) was developed to create and manage the metadata information to provide online and off-line access to video and images obtained during signature (NOAA-sponsored) oceanographic expeditions. NOAA scientists can discover thousands of digital videos and still images, hundreds of digital video clips, highlight movies, and related documents and products via metadata included in NOAALINC, the NCL online catalog (http://www.lib.noaa.gov/). During the development of the VDMS project plan, which is part of a larger comprehensive OER Data Management Project, the VDMS team defined and established several 'best practices' to support OER video data management and metadata requirements. Metadata guidelines developed for digital video (DV12) and digital still images (DI12) help scientists and data managers in the field to create complete descriptive and technical metadata about their video and image data. Scientists, librarians and archivists then use this information to create the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC), MARCXML or MARC21 metadata records. The VDMS team also developed a work-flow for creating and managing metadata information on digital video by defining the process for moving video data from ship to library to archive, including steps for creating archival backup copies and web-accessible video clips and highlights. Many types of metadata are required to ensure that digital video and still images can be interpreted and used by software that may be available on future computers and operating systems. Technical metadata about the encoding format, codices used, playback rates, etc., are critical for software to be able to correctly interpret and display the contents of the digital files. Descriptive metadata is necessary to provide context for the content being displayed and answers questions about when, where, why, and by whom the video and images were obtained. It is often easiest to acquire these types of descriptive and technical metadata from the principal investigator (PI) or data manager soon after each cruise. This paper discusses a process of mapping different metadata schémas, metadata cross-walking and exchange between the NOAA Central Library Network, NODC, and NCDDC data centers to provide comprehensive information on NOAA scientific videos and related products. The paper also explains the library's standard procedures on digital video conversion, preservation and archiving.