Support Repeatable Creator Fields in Marketplace

We would like to request support for repeatable Creator fields in Marketplace.

In most metadata application profiles, the Creator element is repeatable so that resources with multiple creators can be described accurately. This is standard practice for sharing metadata across repositories, catalogs, aggregators, and Research Data Management platforms, where many resources are created collaboratively by more than one individual or organization.

At present, Marketplace appears to support only a single Creator value. This limits the ability to represent co-authored publications, jointly produced datasets, collaborative projects, and other multi-contributor resources accurately. In practice, a resource may have more than one creator, rather than exactly one creator. Restricting the field to a single value results in incomplete metadata and reduces interoperability with systems that expect creator to be repeatable.

This approach is not consistent with common metadata practice. For example, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Metadata Application Profile uses dc:creator in a way that reflects standard repeatable descriptive metadata practice for resources with multiple creators. This is also consistent with broader metadata standards and schemas such as Dublin Core and DataCite, where creator is commonly treated as repeatable unless a local implementation restricts it.

Support for repeatable Creator fields would:

• improve the accuracy and completeness of resource descriptions
• better align Marketplace with common metadata application profiles and community practice
• support collaborative and multi-author outputs
• improve interoperability with downstream systems and metadata aggregators
• strengthen metadata quality for discovery, citation, and reuse

We request that Marketplace support:

1. Multiple Creator entries for a single asset or record
2. Storage of creators as distinct structured values, rather than a single concatenated text field
3. Proper handling of repeatable creators in metadata exports and standards-based mappings
4. Preservation of creator order where relevant
5. Compatibility with both personal and organizational creators

Adding support for repeatable Creator fields would bring Marketplace into closer alignment with established metadata standards and would significantly improve the platform’s ability to describe collaborative resources accurately.

See example below: