[Metadatalibrarians] What is a metadata element?

[McGrath, Kelley C.]

What is a metadata element? This seems like kind of a stupid question, but I am having trouble getting my head around it for some reason so I'm hoping someone on this list can set me straight.

I have poked around and found some definitions:

Dublin Core: "properties for use in resource description" (http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/)

RDA glossary: "A word, phrase, or group of characters representing a distinct unit of bibliographic information." (from the draft at http://www.rdaonline.org/constituencyreview/)

CEN (The European Committee for Standardization) in one of their draft documents on cinematographic works defines an element as "A semantic unit that is a major property of one or more entities. An element can have attributes ([named property whose value domain can be restricted by a data type]) and can be composed of sub-elements ([semantic unit that is a property of an element, but not a direct property of an entity])."

Does anyone know of any other definitions that might be helpful?

I think my sticking points at the moment are two:

1. Are there any constraints on the kinds of things that can be elements? How do you know what to make into an element (presumably depends on context, but are there any guidelines anywhere)? Is there a standard way of talking about more specific information related to an element (attributes, sub-attributes, sub-elements, qualifiers or whatever they might be called) and if so can someone point me to a place where this is described?

2. How are elements related to entities, attributes and relationships from ER modeling? Obviously metadata elements don't have to be related to ER modeling, but if they are, is there a standard way of approaching this? Looking at the DC elements, there seem to be things that are both entities (creator, contributor) and attributes (title, rights). Are there any circumstances under which a relationship would be an element?

Does whether or not a creator or other person is treated as an entity that is related to something or as an attribute depend on whether the name is transcribed or uncontrolled (which almost seems to be a sort of attribute in the context of traditional library cataloging) or is linked to a separate entity record through an identifier or normalized in some way (which seems more like a pointer to a related entity)?

Thank you for any insight you can give me on this.

Kelley

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Kelley McGrath
Cataloging and Metadata Services Librarian (A/V)
Bracken Library
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
(765) 285-3350
kmcgrath at bsu.edu