Modelling cultural entities in diverse domains for digital archives

Many libraries, museums and archives, the so-called memory institutions, have developed digital collections of cultural and historical resources as a primary service they provide online. In this chapter those digital collections are called digital archives. Digital archives have been growing not only in their volumes but also in a variety of cultural domains, e.g., intangible cultural heritage, video games, new media arts etc. While memory institutions have well-established metadata standards for their collections, those conventional standards may not fit well with digital archives oriented to the new domains. This chapter aims to present a set of generalised data models designed as a basis to define metadata schemes for digital archives of various cultural domains, including intangible cultural heritage and new media arts. It shows data models defined for the Media Arts Database (MADB) and Japan Digital Theatre Archives (JDTA) developed as a part of projects funded by the Agency for Cultural Affairs of the Japanese Government. MADB collects metadata of artworks of manga (Japanese comics), animations, video games and new media arts, while JDTA is a digital archive of performing arts of various genres in Japan. The chapter discusses the data models based on some lessons learned from MADB and JDTA.