Belgemetadata

Belgemetadata is a metadata specification intended to describe digital resources within Belgium's national and cultural heritage sectors. It provides a common schema for bibliographic, archival, and multimedia items to support discovery, exchange, and preservation planning.

Origin and scope: Developed by a consortium of libraries, archives, and museums in Belgium in the 2010s, Belgemetadata offers a core set of metadata elements while remaining compatible with international standards. It aims to balance practical cataloging needs with interoperability goals for cross-institution data sharing.

Structure and terminology: The specification defines core elements such as title, creator, date, language, format, identifier, rights, subject, and provenance. It includes fields for preservation metadata and technical characteristics, as well as authority-controlled identifiers for entities. The schema is designed to be extensible and is expressed in both XML-encoded and JSON-LD representations, aligning with widely used vocabularies where appropriate.

Interoperability and encoding: Belgemetadata emphasizes interoperability through crosswalks to Dublin Core, MODS, METS, and PREMIS, and via linked data practices. It supports multiple resource types and is flexible enough to accommodate libraries, archives, and museums.

Governance and adoption: A national metadata council oversees maintenance, with representatives from major cultural institutions and the national archive. Guidelines and training programs promote consistent application, though implementation varies by institution and collection type.

Impact and reception: The standard has facilitated metadata exchange within Belgium and with partner institutions abroad, contributing to more unified discovery portals and improved long-term access. See also Dublin Core, PREMIS, METS, and MODS.