Hyacinth Editing Interface Screenshot

Hyacinth is a metadata editor that will eventually be used to manage the metadata for digital projects.  It was originally developed for the Durst Project but has expanded to accommodate the more widespread metadata needs of the libraries.  The Preservation and Digital Conversion Division has tested it for customer orders, and the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship staff have tested it as well.  Their testing helped identify functionality and features that need to be added to the application, and development work is currently underway.  Hyacinth uses a standardized, internally agreed-upon pool of fields that can then be selected from for use in any given project, allowing for easier standardization of metadata across projects.  The data entered into Hyacinth is exported as MODS XML, and the application encourages the use of controlled vocabularies and uniform resource identifiers (URIs) to identify the controlled terms.  Hyacinth is a forward-thinking approach to metadata that will help establish linked-data-based workflows.