National Metadata Directory

National Metadata Directory (NMA, Národní metadatový adresář in Czech) is a metadata aggregator for datasets in repositories operated in the National Repository Platform and beyond.

Mission

The NMA aggregates (harvests) metadata from all repositories operated in the National Repository Platform and from other repositories that contain datasets produced by Czech academic community.

Its primary purpose is to allow basic searching throughout the repositories, locating datasets of interest for the user. Searching is performed using basic metadata and the NMA contains links to primary repositories.

The NMA does not contain a copy of the data, just its metadata records. Note that the linked repository may support searching using richer set of metadata fields, and may have specialised functions depending on the metadata that make searching easier to use and more specific.

Using the NMA

The metadata in the NMA is publicly available. There is no need to log in just to browse the records.

Browse to the web interface of the NMA.

You can either use the search bar to type in keywords of interest.

Or, by clicking on Show all records, you open a browser that supports listing the records, and filtering them using various parameters.

Listing of an individual record is rather intuitive, the link “Original record” points to the original repository keeping the original data record itself.

Creating Metadata Records in the NMA

Since 2026, having a metadata record in the NMA is mandatory for datasets collected to IS VaVaI. Ideally, the repositories containing the primary datasets should be harvested by the NMA. If it is not the case for your dataset, you can obtain write access to the NMA and create the metadata record manually.