Contact Master List

Contacts involved in a project or product are referenced in the metadata records. Contacts are required to have name, contact type, email, and organization affiliated. Position, phone, address, availability, and online resource are an optional best practice. Personal email, home address, or personal phone number should not be included. In the metadata records, you will assign a role to each contact according to their involvement in the project.

Organization contacts are hierarchical and mdEditor preserves these relationships in the metadata. For example, a best practice is to add the office contact (as an organization) to an individual contact in the member of organization field. In this way, the general office contact information is present in the metadata for a record that includes the individual. The member of organizations for an individual should include the office, the program, and the top level organization.

Organizational contacts can be used to maintain the general information of a field office in the metadata when they are included in the roles or are linked to an individual contact as a member of organization.

The Alaska has created a master contact list for staff use. Maintaining a master list reduces double entry and saves time since contact information that is already entered! The Alaska master contact list is stored in the contacts folder in the Regional Data Repository. This file is maintained and updated by your program Data Managers. If there is a contact missing or incorrect, please work with your program data manager to make the changes..

Once contacts are imported into mdEditor, they can be used in any metadata record. It is good practice to review some contacts for accuracy in mdEditor before creating or editing your metadata records.

The master contact list is maintained in the 'contacts' folder in the RDR

Current and archived master contact files are available in the RDR contacts folder.

To load the Alaska master contact file to mdEditor, simple click Import tab in mdEditor, access the Regional Data Repository space, and drag and drop the AKcontactsmdeditor file into the box. Select click to import. Best practice is to update your contacts before editing or creating any new metadata records. Once contacts are imported into mdEditor, they can be used in any metadata record.

If you load the Contacts file and see that there is no record for a person or position that you need for your metadata, you may either contact your Data Manager to add that person to the master contacts file or create a new contact record and submit the record to your Data Manager for inclusion into the master contacts file.