Catalogoijien

Catalogoijien is a hypothetical metadata schema designed for describing items in online catalogs and digital repositories. It aims to provide a concise, interoperable framework capable of representing catalog records across languages, disciplines, and administrative contexts.

The term catalogoijien is a neologism created by a consortium of library professionals and information technologists in the early 2020s. It reflects an intent to unify descriptive metadata while remaining adaptable to existing cataloging practices.

Core to catalogoijien are a set of structured fields that cover identification, description, and relationships. Typical elements include an identifier, title, creator or author, publisher, date, language, material type or genre, and format. Descriptive notes, subject terms, extent, and rights statements are supported, along with provenance and hierarchical or related-record relations. The schema is designed to work with RDF or JSON-LD data models and to accommodate multilingual text through language-tagged fields. Controlled vocabularies and authority files are recommended to increase consistency.

Catalogoijien is intended for use by cultural heritage institutions, academic libraries, and digital repositories to improve interoperability and cross-institution search. It provides mechanisms to map to established standards such as Dublin Core, MARC, and METS, and to export metadata for harvest and preservation workflows. Proponents emphasize its flexibility for multilingual and multidisciplinary collections.

Adoption of catalogoijien has been limited and primarily experimental. Critics point to the complexity of maintaining multiple metadata schemas and the lack of an official governance body. As a provisional framework, it remains of interest in discussions about catalog interoperability.