The RLG has released new guidelines for their Cultural Materials Initiative. Note the extremely slim descriptive requirements: creator, type, title, date, id, and pointer. It appears that a record would be acceptable with just a unique id, a work type, and a pointer to a surrogate if the creator, title, and date were not known. There are other elements to the “value-added” and “bonus” segments of the “core fields,” but the admission seems to be that thorough metadata is very hard to get.
