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Many discipline-specific and community-specific metadata standards have evolved to meet the challenge of supporting data management and discovery, as well as capturing information and communicating it to users. Islandora by default tends to use MODS , and the DC datastreams provided natively by FedoraCommons , for descriptive metadata, PREMIS for preservation metadata (leveraging the AUDIT datastream from FedoraCommons), MARCXML for some ingests, etc. However, Islandora supports any XML-based metadata standard or approach and leverages xsl for crosswalking and indexing of metadata. 

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• A representative document defines the XML elements allowed in a given schema; this representative document has an .xsd file extension.  
• A mapping document defines how to translate XMLS XML elements between schemas; this document has an .xsl or .xslt extension.  

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When an object is created in Islandora, a datastream containing Dublin Core XML metadata is automatically produced and is given "DC" as its DSID, but you . You will most likely want a separate datastream containing metadata from a richer metadata schema. For this reason, Islandora Solution Packs usually provide on one or more MODS forms (and occasionally other forms) for storing more complex descriptive metadata. Typically, developers of Islandora Solution packs will define DSIDs appropriate to the metadata standard being used. For example, Islandora Solution packs usually store MODS metadata in a datastream with the DSID "MODS."

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In order to crosswalk metadata, Islandora makes extensive use of XML transformations, or .xsltsxslt. Transformation Transformations serve a number of purposes in the Islandora system. Solution packs provide default transformations that do things like crosswalk MODS metadata to DC on ingest and edit of metadata. Both MODS and DC are thus persisted and kept in sync. When creating and editing forms based on new schemas, systems administrators can also add .xslt files to folders in an Islandora installation, and make them available for administrators. 

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