Organizations need to provide information on their objects to many portals
or aggregators including those that are thematic, cross domain, regional, national and international. The difficulty, for the portal or aggregator owner, is that the object information is in the providers’ own collections management systems and cataloguing databases. Each of these has potentially a different metadata format. This means that it is both time consuming and costly to integrate information from all those organizations wanting to participate.

Using LIDO to provide a harvestable set of an item’s descriptive metadata enables the organization to participate in such initiatives in a standard way. LIDO provides a cost effective solution for the:

• Providing organisation, which can supply the same data to many portals and aggregators
• Portals and aggregators, which can be supplied with data from many organisations.

In both cases the benefit is gained by not having to carry out multiple metadata mappings.