Although many documents are often self-explanatory, it is recommended that for resource discovery and provenance purposes some basic metadata is recorded for each individual or set of documents. There are a large number of long-standing metadata standards that have arisen from a wide variety of communities (e.g. MARC[1] within the library sector) and each have their own strengths and weaknesses. Within the context of recording resource discovery and provenance metadata (rather than technical file metadata recorded by formats such as textMD[2]) the metadata set described below aims to simply record a bare minimum but do so in a way which maps easily to other existing standards (most notably the fifteen elements of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set[3]). With documents in particular, there is the tendency that an overlap may exist between project level metadata and that describing documents produced as a result of a project (e.g. reports describing the project).

Element	Description
Title	Title of document.
Abstract	Short description of document.
Date Published	Year of publication.
Published	Where relevant, the full location details of any published versions i.e. series/journal title, issue and volume number. Start and end page numbers or number of pages should also be recorded.
Publisher	Name of document publisher and location.
ISBN	ISBN[4] number (where applicable).
DOI	Digital Object Identifier (DOI)[5] (where applicable).
URL	URL (where applicable).
Related files / resources	Details of related files or resources.
Language	The language (English, Spanish, etc.) used within the document. It is recommended that a controlled vocabulary (e.g. RFC 4646) is used and specified.
Author	Name of primary author(s).
Contributor	Names of contributors, should be qualified e.g. Editor, Translator, Contributor.
Email	Email address for author

In addition to the elements outlined above a number of other elements may need to be recorded at the document level. As mentioned previously, most of these elements may apply to a set of documents produced by a project and therefore be covered by project level metadata. They are therefore outlined here as optional elements to be used where documents produced by a project differ in scope.

Element	Description
Project name	Name of associated project.
Subject	Monument, site type, culture, object, material keywords. Maps to DC Subject
Investigation type
Spatial coverage.	Single point or series of points defining site extents, minimum and maximum latitude and longitude.
Temporal terms	Period keywords, start and end dates, C14 dates.

[1] http://www.loc.gov/marc/

[2] http://www.loc.gov/standards/textMD/

[3] http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/

[4] http://www.isbn-international.org/

[5] http://www.doi.org/