Object description: In 1492 Christopher Columbus discovered America, this fact was linked to augmented diffusion that geographical books and maps saw thank to the new invention from Gutenberg. This Map from the Geographer Martin Waldseemüller represent the first printed world map that has inside it also some parts of the new continent called America, by Waldseemüller, in honor of Amerigo Vespucci. The huge enhancement of production due to the printing press revolution helped to the diffusion of a great quantity of new maps in Western Europe, giving an important tool to all adventurers, companies and governments involved in explorations and global trades.
Why we considered it: As Indulgence and 95 Theses items, this map represent one aspect of printing press revolution in one domain of Renaissance world: geography and specifically cartography.
Standard used: The LOC uses different metadata standard for the map description and encoding. They use a brief Dublin Core encoding made only by a small part of the 15 categories from DCMI. They also use MODS, a metadata XML based standard created by LOC. It is made by a transformation and an enlargement of the machine-readable MARC21 standard to a natural language XML description of a record. It is mainly developed to describe bibliographical entries. It is very powerful thank to a rich metadata element set with specific attributes that help to refine the record and integrate elements from other metadata standards in specific areas.
The item has also the MARC XML that is an XML Schema of the MARC numerical metadata element used to encode bibliographical elements.