An Online Lightweight Metadata Editing Tool

Digital archives have become an important mean for preserving and using artifacts. In addition to converting an (analogue) object into digital form, an important aspect of digitization is to describe the object through metadata.
Producing metadata is time-consuming and labor-intensive work. From a system point of view, there are usually two ways to create metadata for a collection. One is to use a stand-alone system that is designed for a specific collection of objects with the same metadata attributes. The other one is to use a general purpose system such as Excel that allows the user to create attributes on the fly. The drawback of the former is lack of flexibility if the attributes need to be modified, while it is usually difficult in the latter to link the metadata created with the digital objects.
In this study we present a system that attempts to take advantage of the convenience from both sides while make up for their shortcomings. Our system allows a user to design her own metadata attributes, and provides a convenient editing mode and easy-to-use operating procedures. More importantly, it allows a natural way to link the metadata records with the digital objects that they are describing. We hope this system can provide the versatility and convenience that annotators of metadata need.