ABSTRACT
Collection curators develop locally defined unique fields to support local requirements. As per the guidelines of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), Simple Dublin Core is the minimum requirement for exposing metadata to aggregators. Oftentimes the level of specificity of unique local fields is not translated well to Dublin Core, which may hinder the interoperability of the item metadata record. This paper researched 21 digital collections that were hosted in CONTENTdm. The objective was to explore the use and issues of unique fields in local context and recommend best practices that will increase the interoperability of metadata for special collections.
