Metadata Standards for Virtual Museums

The raison d’être of museums are their collections. Museums’ main purpose is to collect, preserve exhibit and interpret the objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific significance for the higher reasons of education, study and enjoyment. Museum objects are information carriers. In the Information and Communication Technologies era information about museum objects is documented, organized and communicated with the help of information systems in virtual museums. Considering the working definition of the ViMM project, a virtual museum (VM) can be considered a digital entity that, considering the museum’s specificities, enhances, complements, or augments the museum through interactivity, personalization, user experience and richness of content. The virtual museums’ context is organized with the help of metadata, the data about the data. This paper presents the main metadata standards used by virtual museums and the qualitative results of an extensive survey conducted in the framework of the ViMM project for identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the main used metadata standards.