Product Entry Guidance

The Product Entry Guidance section will cover how to create a metadata record for a product. A product can be anything from a document or presentation or website to a dataset or programming code. mdEditor offers an extensive list of product options, of which "product" should never be used.

Before You Begin

Adjust your mdEditor Settings:

Metadata Repositories: Make sure your default settings are correct for the SA Science Catalog and data.gov. See Settings.

Parent Identifier: In the publishing settings, enter your SA regional ScienceBase project folder's identifier in the "Default Parent Identifier" field.

Select the Product Profile:

After creating your product record initially and before you begin adding metadata, select Product from the Profile drop down in the main menu. This will limit the number of available tabs and only show tabs that contain fields that are required for product creation.

Make sure your contacts are loaded into mdEditor:

In mdEditor, contacts are created separately from individual records, and then stored within a library in mdEditor. Once contacts have been entered or imported into mdEditor, they can be used in metadata records. SA maintains a 'seed' list of contacts that can be found in the SA ScienceBase community item page.

Edit a Product

1. Import or create your product record (see workflow).
2. Choose the specific Resource Type that describes your product. Do not choose the generic "product."
3. Select the Product Profile: from the Main Menu (Top Navigation Bar) select "Product" from the profile drop-down menu.
4. Fill out metadata information for the following tabs:
   • Main Tab: Product
   • Metadata Tab: Product
   • Keywords Tab: Product
   • Taxonomy Tab: Product
   • Extent Tab: Product
   • Lineage Tab: Product
   • Distribution Tab: Product
   • Constraints Tab: Product
   • Dictionaries Tab: Product
   • Documents Tab: Product
5. If applicable, associate your products with other metadata records.

Required Fields for Products

Main Tab

• Title
• Status
• Language
• Resource Type
• Point of Contact
• Main Citation
  • Title
  • Identifier
  • Responsible Parties
  • Online Resource URI
• Description
  • Abstract
• Time Period
  • Start Date
  • End Date

Metadata Tab

• Metadata Status
• Date
• Metadata Contacts
• Metadata Identifier
• Parent Metadata
  • Title
  • Identifier
  • Namespace
• Metadata Repositories
• Online Resource

Extent Tab

• Geographic Extent

Keywords Tab

• ISO Topic Category
• SA Priority Area Category
• SA Science Category
• Conservation Action Open Standard
• GCMD Keywords (Best Practice)

Taxonomy Tab

• Taxonomic classifications

Extent Tab

• Geographic Extent

Distribution Tab

• Distributor
  • Contact
  • Role
  • Online Option
    • URI

Constraints

• Legal
  • Access Constraint