Étiquette : Metadata

Open Social Knowledge Creation and Library and Archival Metadata

Authors: Dean Seeman, Heather Dean

Standardization both reflects and facilitates the collaborative and networked approach to metadata creation within the fields of librarianship and archival studies.

These standards—such as Resource Description and Access and Rules for Archival Description—and the theoretical frameworks they embody enable professionals to work more effectively together.

Yet such guidelines also determine who is qualified to undertake the work of cataloging and processing in libraries and archives. Both fields are empathetic to facilitating user-generated metadata and have taken steps towards collaborating with their research communities (as illustrated, for example, by social tagging and folksonomies) but these initial experiments cannot yet be regarded as widely adopted and radically open and social.

This paper explores the recent histories of descriptive work in libraries and archives and the challenges involved in departing from deeply established models of metadata creation.

URL : Open Social Knowledge Creation and Library and Archival Metadata

Harvesting the Academic Landscape: Streamlining the Ingestion of Professional Scholarship Metadata into the Institutional Repository

Authors : Jonathan Bull, Teresa Auch Schultz

INTRODUCTION

Although librarians initially hoped institutional repositories (IRs) would grow through researcher self-archiving, practice shows that growth is much more likely through library-directed deposit. Libraries must then find efficient ways to ingest material into their IR to ensure growth and relevance.

DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM

Valparaiso University developed and implemented a workflow that was semiautomated to help cut down on the time needed to ingest articles into its IR, ValpoScholar. The workflow, which continues to be refined, makes use of practices and ideas used by other repositories to more efficiently collect metadata for items and upload them to the repository.

NEXT STEPS

The article discusses the pros and cons of this workflow and areas of ingesting that still need to be addressed, including adding full-text items, checking copyright policies, managing student staffing, and dealing with hurdles created by the repository’s software.

URL : Harvesting the Academic Landscape: Streamlining the Ingestion of Professional Scholarship Metadata into the Institutional Repository

DOI : http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2201

Big Metadata, Smart Metadata, and Metadata Capital: Toward Greater Synergy Between Data Science and Metadata

Author : Jane Greenberg

Purpose

The purpose of the paper is to provide a framework for addressing the disconnect between metadata and data science. Data science cannot progress without metadata research. This paper takes steps toward advancing the synergy between metadata and data science, and identifies pathways for developing a more cohesive metadata research agenda in data science.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper identifies factors that challenge metadata research in the digital ecosystem, defines metadata and data science, and presents the concepts big metadata, smart metadata, and metadata capital as part of a metadata lingua franca connecting to data science.

Findings

The “utilitarian nature” and “historical and traditional views” of metadata are identified as two intersecting factors that have inhibited metadata research. Big metadata, smart metadata, and metadata capital are presented as part of a metadata lingua franca to help frame research in the data science research space.

Research limitations

There are additional, intersecting factors to consider that likely inhibit metadata research, and other significant metadata concepts to explore.

Practical implications

The immediate contribution of this work is that it may elicit response, critique, revision, or, more significantly, motivate research. The work presented can encourage more researchers to consider the significance of metadata as a research worthy topic within data science and the larger digital ecosystem.

Originality/value

Although metadata research has not kept pace with other data science topics, there is little attention directed to this problem. This is surprising, given that metadata is essential for data science endeavors. This examination synthesizes original and prior scholarship to provide new grounding for metadata research in data science.

URL : Big Metadata, Smart Metadata, and Metadata Capital: Toward Greater Synergy Between Data Science and Metadata

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1515/jdis-2017-0012

High-Quality Metadata and Repository Staffing: Perceptions of United States–Based OpenDOAR Participants

Digital repositories require good metadata, created according to community-based principles that include provisions for interoperability. When metadata is of high quality, digital objects become sharable and metadata can be harvested and reused outside of the local system.

A sample of U.S.-based repository administrators from the OpenDOAR initiative were surveyed to understand aspects of the quality and creation of their metadata, and how their metadata could improve.

Most respondents (65%) thought their metadata was of average quality; none thought their metadata was high quality or poor quality. The discussion argues that increased strategic staffing will alleviate many perceived issues with metadata quality.

URL : http://tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01639374.2015.1116480

OpenDOAR Repositories and Metadata Practices

“In spring 2014, authors from the University of Missouri conducted a nation-wide survey on metadata practices among United States-based OpenDOAR repositories. Examining the repository systems and current practices of metadata in these repositories, researchers collected and analyzed the responses of 23 repositories. Results from this survey include information about the creators of metadata, best practices and resources, and controlled vocabularies. Findings will inform libraries about the current state of repository and metadata choices in open repositories in the United States, especially as they pertain to overarching questions of interoperability.”

URL : http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march15/moulaison/03moulaison.html

Loading Brief MARC Records for Open-Access Books in an Academic Library Online Catalog

Mbooks are open-access, digitized books freely available on the Internet. This article describes the Auraria Library’s experience of loading brief MARC records for Mbooks into its online public access catalog and looks at some of the issues that arose from the record-loading project.

Despite the low quality of the records, librarians in Auraria Library thought that loading them into the catalog was advantageous because of the rich content in the collection, and because many of the records could be improved using the global update functionality in the catalog.

Making the records available through the catalog, as opposed to merely linking to the entire collection from the Library’s Web page, was considered to be valuable because of the aggregation a catalog provides, and because the Mbooks collection helped fill gaps in the Library’s physical collections.

As more open-access, digitized books become available, libraries will need to plan and manage how best to provide access to them.

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/15841

The Strongest Link: Libraries and Linked…

The Strongest Link: Libraries and Linked Data :

“Since 1999 the W3C has been working on a set of Semantic Web standards that have the potential to revolutionize web search. Also known as Linked Data, the Machine-Readable Web, the Web of Data, or Web 3.0, the Semantic Web relies on highly structured metadata that allow computers to understand the relationships between objects. Semantic web standards are complex, and difficult to conceptualize, but they offer solutions to many of the issues that plague libraries, including precise web search, authority control, classification, data portability, and disambiguation. This article will outline some of the benefits that linked data could have for libraries, will discuss some of the non-technical obstacles that we face in moving forward, and will finally offer suggestions for practical ways in which libraries can participate in the development of the semantic web.”

URL : http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november10/byrne/11byrne.html