OSU Library Metadata: A Guideline to Best Practices: Coverage

Label: Coverage
Maps to Dublin Core Element Name: Coverage
Maps to MARC field (in World Cat): 522 (spatial), 648 (temporal)
Mandatory: Optional, but recommended
Repeatable: Yes
Qualifiers:
Refinements:

Schemes:

The extent or scope of the content of the resource.

Coverage will typically include spatial location (a place name or geographic coordinates), temporal period (a period label, date, or date range), or jurisdiction (such as a named administrative entity). Spatial refers to the locations covered by the intellectual content of the resource, not the place of publication. Temporal refers to the time periods covered by the intellectual content of the resource, not the publication date or date of interview.

For locally controlled terms, an internal list will be preferably utilized. Other sources also may be used for controlled vocabulary such as the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN) and the thesauri listed under Subject element. For inputting spatial coordinates use the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) standards for latitude /longitude.

1. For locally controlled terms the best practice recommendation is to select a descriptive time period (e.g., Middle Ages, Dust Bowl, Civil War) from a controlled vocabulary. Date(s) may be added covering the time period of the intellectual content.
2. Enter dates in the form “in accordance with the W3C Date Time Format (W3C-DTF) encoding scheme. Use a single hyphen to separate the year, month, and date components: Year: YYYY (“1897” for the year 1897) Year and Year: YYYY-YYYY “1922-1997” for the date range) Year and month: YYYY-MM (“1897-07” for July 1897) Complete date: YYYY-MM-DD (“1897-07-16” for July 16, 1897)

Spatial

1. For locally controlled terms the best practice recommendation is to spell out names of states, provinces, and countries. List the locations from the smallest to the largest entities.
2. For geographical coordinates enter the latitude /longitude according to the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) standards.
3. Care should be taken to provide consistent information that can be interpreted by human users, particularly in order to provide interoperability in situations where sophisticated geographic or time-specific searching is not supported. For most simple applications, place names or coverage dates might be most useful.