The Tamil Metadata dictionary will aim to make publicly available a manual and series of controlled vocabularies for cataloguing in Tamil.  This document makes provisions for managing MODS based metadata that must align with MARC21 and RAD formats for complementary systems.

This document will ultimately inform the migration of this metadata to a linked-data platform, the creation of machine readable endpoints in OAI-PMH and, later, through SPARQL, and the contribution of this metadata to other centralized systems, so as to maximize the use and value of these collections to the Tamil-speaking community.

This document is undertaken to illustrate decisions that were made in creating the metadata and to foster transparency in the project and contribute to the community of practice around Tamil metadata creation.

This manual is undertaken in partnership with the Institute of the Fraser Valley's South Asian Studies Institute. We aim to publish the manual using eCampus Ontario's hosted Pressbooks platform.