Perhaps the most important goal of this paper is to open a new dialogue in the ongoing conversation about digital library standards, specifically, to discuss the need for any new best practices and standards that are required if the digital library is to meet traditional collection, preservation, and access objectives. Clearly, the standards and best practices mentioned above play an important role in answering this question. However, this paper and the MoA II Testbed Project in general focus on a new area of discussion that goes beyond the discovery of a digital object, and focuses on how it is handled once it is found. If tools are to be developed that can work with digitized archival objects across distributed repositories, these objects will require some form of standardization. This paper aims to begin the discussion of digital object definitions by developing and examining metadata standards for digital representations of a variety of archival objects, whether they be in the form of text, digitized page images, photographs, etc.
Descriptive metadata is used to discover the object.
The paper proposes defining new standards for the Structural and Administrative metadata that will be needed to view and manage digital objects. Structural metadata defines the object's internal organization and is needed for display and navigation of that object. At a higher level, this paper proposes a Digital Library Service Model in which services are based on tools that work with the digital objects from distributed repositories. This borrows from the popular object oriented design model. It defines a digital object as encapsulating content, metadata and methods.