Legacy Matters: Describing Subject-Based Digital Historical Collections

ABSTRACTEvolving institutional structures and missions affect the metadata and digitization efforts of a cultural heritage institution. This article discusses the institutional challenges the National Agricultural Library (NAL) faced as it gathered contemporary and historical federal dietary guidance publications into a digital collection. The Library has over time used a variety of descriptive subject and classification schemes as well as a variety of encoding mechanisms, each in response to the administrative as well as technological changes and challenges in the repository. As the Library began compiling content for its Historical Dietary Guidance Digital Collection (HDGDC), it confronted an array of records dispersed across various series and collections with heterogeneous metadata, which are legacies of centuries-long institutional evolution. The authors consider the implications for archives and special collections in creating subject-based digital collections from items dispersed across institution...