Academic Technologies has been involved for several years in the development of archives for teaching and research. The content of these archives has been wide ranging: art collections, video collections, spoken word collections, literary texts and lexicons, newspapers, maps,....

Finding recordings of specific interest in collections as vast as these
is possible by searching descriptive metadata. Each collection contains
description suited to its content. For example, the Oyez Project,
comprised of oral arguments before the Supreme Court of the United States
contains metadata including discussion of the constitutional issues in
question for each case, as well as dates, participants, case identifiers,
and links to related materials in FindLaw. Each case is also indexed with
subject terms from the Harold J. Spaeth U.S. Supreme Court Judicial
Database. Similarly, the BBC collection contains metadata describing the
content and circumstances of their recorded programs. While reconciling
descriptive vocabularies and cataloging practice across the various
collections is beyond the scope of this project, we have developed field
mappings to unqualified Dublin Core for each collection. Each item then
contains a full native metadata record for description as well as a
Dublin Core record for indexing and searching. Additionally each digital
encoding of the audio is accompanied by technical metadata describing the
encoding parameters and digital file formats. Structural metadata is
needed to package these various audio formats, descriptive, technical,
and administrative metadata, and written transcripts for each recording.
We are using METS for this purpose in Oyez, and are working to develop a
common METS profile that can apply across the collections.

This tight bundling of various kinds of metadata and written transcripts
with various digital encodings and formats of the audio recordings tp
encapsulate a single item presents a challenge for content management.
Managing these complex objects and maintaining versions of the various
files that comprise each item is accomplished with a digital repository.
The repository is a gatekeeper and version manager for access to the
audio objects and their various expressions. We are using the FEDORA
object repository and have developed various FEDORA object models for
these and other materials.