Content Metadata Standards for Marine Science: A Case Study

The U.S. Geological Survey developed a content metadata standard to meet the demands of organizing electronic resources in the marine sciences for a broad, heterogeneous audience. These metadata standards are used by the Marine Realms Information Bank project, a Web-based public distributed library of marine science from academic institutions and government agencies. The development and deployment of this metadata standard serve as a model, complete with lessons about mistakes, for the creation of similarly specialized metadata standards for digital libraries.