Resumen de Descriptive Metadata for Field Books: Methods and Practices of the Field Book Project

Sonoe Nakasone, Carolyn Sheffield

• Field books are primary source materials documenting the events leading up to, and including, the collection of specimens or observation of species for the purposes of natural history research. The mission of the Field Book Project (FBP) is to create one online location for field book content. The FBP uses the collection and item level descriptive standards Natural Collections Description (NCD) and Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), respectively. Additionally, field book creators are described using Encoded Archival Context (EAC). In this paper we explain the descriptive metadata used by FBP for field books, which share characteristics of museum, archives, and library objects, and explain why these schemas were chosen, how they are used, and the challenges and future goals of FBP.