Metadata Schema

Europeana is primarily a metadata sharing service - a large database of metadata describing digital cultural objects from many collections across Europe.

To make it possible to search across all these collections, the metadata in Europeana complies with a standard schema, the Europeana Semantic Elements or ESE. ESE is an extension of the popular Dublin Core metadata schema, with a few extra Europeana-specific fields.

Please contribute your data using the fields specified in ESE, as described here. You should contribute your metadata in sets (groups) of several (dozens, hundreds or thousands) of items, each of which is described by an ESE record.

Here's a simple example of a contribution to Europeana, describing just a single item, and so made up of just a single record. Italics are comments. A much more detailed description of each field, and of other field which may be relevant to you, appears in the ESE documentation.

First, there are some headers. These appear, regardless of how many records you are contributing:

<metadata xmlns="http://www.europeana.eu/schemas/ese/"

xmlns:europeana="http://www.europeana.eu/schemas/ese/"

xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"

xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/">

Then, there are one or more (usually many more!) records

<record>
<dc:title>Kilkenny Castle</dc:title>
<dc:creator>ACL</dc:creator>
<dc:subject> Keywords - Castle, Normans, Ormonde, Ireland</dc:subject>
<dc:description>A short description of the image e.g. The imposing Kilkenny Castle, originally built in 1195 by Richard De Clare, 2nd Earl Of Pembroke, better known as Strongbow following the Norman invasion of Ireland and became the seat of the Butlers of Ormonde for centuries. Today the castle and grounds are open to the public.</dc:description>
<dc:publisher>who is making the item available online www.askaboutireland.ie </dc:publisher>
<dc:contributor>anyone else who contributed to the process ACL</dc:contributor>
<dc:date>When the item was created, or some other important date for the item 2010</dc:date>
<dc:type>photograph</dc:type>
<dc:format>MIME type, e.g. image/jpeg</dc:format>
<dc:identifier>A unique identifier, as used in the collection from which the item comes e.g. AAI-12345</dc:identifier>
<dc:source>ACL</dc:source>
<dcterms:spatial>Locations described or related to the item Kilkenny City Ireland</dcterms:spatial>
<dc:rights>Copyright information:Copyright managed by the Library Council </dc:rights>
<europeana:unstored> A spare field, not used yet</europeana:unstored>
<europeana:object>The URL of the best quality version of the item, from which a thumbnail can be created. If a thumbnail exists already, this can be the URL of the thumbnail: http://www.askaboutireland.ie/aai-files/assets/Environment/CountyFocus/Kilkenny-Castle.jpg</europeana:object>
<europeana:provider>Europeana's own provider field: www.askaboutireland.ie</europeana:provider>
<europeana:type>Europeana's own type field, see ESE documents for details: IMAGE</europeana:type>
<europeana:isShownAt>The URL on which the item can be seen, surrounded by relevant contextual information. An example is the web page on which the picture appears. This is where the Europeana link will take the end user. http://www.askaboutireland.ie/reading-room/environment-geography/environmental-information/county-focus/kilkenny/kilkenny-castle/index.xml</europeana:isShownAt>
</record>