Towards cross-organizational interoperability: The LIDO XML schema as a national level integration tool for the national digital library of Finland

Abstract

The Finnish National Digital Library (NDL) project aims to improve online accessibility and usability of digital content held by libraries, museums and archives. The lack of standardized metadata and numerous different collection management systems without sufficient set of technical standards in the museum sector led us to create a set of instructions and a template mapping of the Lightweight Information Describing Objects (LIDO) XML schema. This national LIDO schema for museum sector described in our paper is unique both in coverage in museum object types as well as number of institutions using it. A common schema presents heterogeneous metadata uniformly, thus enabling easy retrieval, browsing and versatile linking between different object types as well as data fields. In the pilot phase we have mapped the three most commonly used Finnish collection management systems with three different metadata formats to the top level LIDO schema. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.