[Metadatalibrarians] metadata harvesting and special characters

[Ellen Corrigan]

Hello, I need some guidance as to which special characters should or should
not be used in metadata content, in anticipation of portability and
shareability if/when the data get harvested.  I'm thinking of things like
ISBD punctuation, the double dashes used in subject heading strings, etc.

 

The particulars of this situation are that I'm using MARC catalog records as
the basis for the metadata.  I've run it through MarcEdit-so I've already
seen that special characters may translate in unexpected ways-and now I'm at
the stage of editing the data before importing into CONTENTdm.

 

Relatedly, for those of you who have used CONTENTdm, is it better to use
semicolons or the <br> [line break] tag to separate multiple values within
the same element?  The latter seems as if it would display in a more
readable way, but I don't know how portable it is.

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Ellen K. Corrigan

Assistant Professor, Library Services

Booth Library

Eastern Illinois University

Charleston, IL 61920

(217) 581-8456

ekcorrigan at eiu.edu