Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Discussions surrounding digital libraries and their metadata have become less robust than before, given that creating and hosting digital collections have become the norm for most cultural heritage institutions over the last 20 years. Consequently, there are fewer discussions of how the characteristics of digital collections and their metadata have changed over time. This article showcases the evolution of digital collections and their metadata at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Library in the last 20 years. It discusses the growth of its collections and their characteristics, examines historical changes in the use of metadata elements, and explores responses to the changing nature of digitized and born-digital materials. Based on a large-scale data analysis of the digital collections and their metadata housed in UIUC Digital Library, the paper also examines the challenges and opportunities of the curation and management of digital collections and digital libraries in the future.
Luke et al. (Thu,) studied this question.