National Science Council (NSC) of Taiwan had been in charge of the National Digital Archiving Project (NDAP) from 2002 to 2012. Over the 10 years, many important institutions had participated in NDAP, including Academia Historica, Taiwan Historica, Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica, and the Taiwan Provincial Consultative Council. The digitized collections are from Ming Dynasty, Ch'ing Dynasty, Japanese Occupied Period (1895-1945), and the period of Republican China (1912-present). The total number of digitized items in the project is over 1.4 million. In this study, digitized items with metadata elements designed by Metadata Architecture and Application Team (MAAT) were analyzed and compared to find core elements of each level according to their metadata requirements specifications. The outcomes may serve as reference for future design of metadata elements, and permit contextualized export of archival metadata as the foundation for next generation archival description. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
