This study presents the current state of research and practice on metadata quality through focus on the functional perspective on metadata quality, measurement, and evaluation criteria coupled with mechanisms for improving metadata quality. Quality metadata reflect the degree to which the metadata in question perform the core bibliographic functions of discovery, use, provenance, currency, authentication, and administration. The functional perspective is closely tied to the criteria and measurements used for assessing metadata quality. Accuracy, completeness, and consistency are the most common criteria used in measuring metadata quality in the literature. Guidelines embedded within a Web form or template perform a valuable function in improving the quality of the metadata. Results of the study indicate a pressing need for the building of a common data model that is interoperable across digital repositories.

Metadata Quality in Digital Repositories: A Survey of the Current State of the Art

Owing to the recent developments in automatic metadata generation and interoperability between digital repositories, the production of metadata is now vastly surpassing manual quality control capabilities. Abandoning quality control altogether is problematic, because low-quality metadata compromise the effectiveness of services that repositories provide to their users. To address this problem, we present a set of scalable quality metrics for metadata based on the Bruce & Hillman framework for metadata quality control. We perform three experiments to evaluate our metrics: (1) the degree of correlation between the metrics and manual quality reviews, (2) the discriminatory power between metadata sets and (3) the usefulness of the metrics as low-quality filters. Through statistical analysis, we found that several metrics, especially Text Information Content, correlate well with human evaluation and that the average of all the metrics are roughly as effective as people to flag low-quality instances. The implications of this finding are discussed. Finally, we propose possible applications of the metrics to improve tools for the administration of digital repositories.

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Automatic evaluation of metadata quality in digital repositories

Introduction The federation of digital resources has become increasingly important in realizing the full potential of digital libraries. Federation is often achieved through the aggregation of descriptive metadata, therefore the decisions resource developers make for the creation, maintenance, and quality assurance of their metadata can have significant impacts on aggregators and service providers. Metadata may be of high quality within a local database or web site, but when it is taken out of this context, information may be lost or its integrity may be compromised. Maintaining consistency and fitness for purpose are also complicated when metadata are combined in a federated environment. A fuller understanding of the criteria for high quality, “shareable” metadata is crucial to the next step in the development of federated digital libraries. This study of metadata quality was conducted by the IMLS Digital Collections and Content (DCC) project team (http://imlsdcc.grainger.uiuc.edu/) using quantitative and qualitative analysis of metadata authoring practices of several projects funded through the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grant (NLG) program. We present a number of statistical characterizations of metadata samples drawn from a large corpus harvested through the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH) and interpret these findings in relation to general quality dimensions and metadata practices that occur at the local level. We discuss the impact of these kinds of quality on aggregation and suggest quality control and normalization processes that may improve search and discovery services at the aggregated level.

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Is 'Quality' Metadata 'Shareable' Metadata? The Implications of Local Metadata Practice on Federated Collections

Over three years ago, the Core Integration team of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) implemented a digital library based on metadata aggregation using Dublin Core and OAI-PMH. The initial expectation was that such low-barrier technologies would be relatively easy to automate and administer. While this architectural choice permitted rapid deployment of a production NSDL, our three years of experience have contradicted our original expectations of easy automation and low people cost. We have learned that alleged "low-barrier" standards are often harder to deploy than expected. In this paper we report on this experience and comment on the general cost, the functionality, and the ultimate effectiveness of this architecture.

Metadata aggregation and "automated digital libraries": a retrospective on the NSDL experience

The importance of managing research data has been emphasized by the government, funding agencies, and scholarly communities. Increased access to research data increases the impact and efficiency of scientific activities and funding. Thus, many research institutions have established or plan to establish research data curation services as part of their Institutional Repositories (IRs). However, in order to design effective research data curation services in IRs, and to build active research data providers and user communities around those IRs, it is essential to study current data curation practices and provide rich descriptions of the sociotechnical factors and relationships shaping those practices. Based on 13 interviews with 15 IR staff members from 13 large research universities in the United States, this paper provides a rich, qualitative description of research data curation and use practices in IRs. In particular, the paper identifies data curation and use activities in IRs, as well as their structures, roles played, skills needed, contradictions and problems present, solutions sought, and workarounds applied. The paper can inform the development of best practice guides, infrastructure and service templates, as well as education in research data curation in Library and Information Science (LIS) schools.

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Practices of research data curation in institutional repositories: A qualitative view from repository staff

As part of a federation project providing integrated access to over 170 digital collections, we are studying how collections can best be represented to meet the needs of service providers and diverse user communities. This paper reports on recent results from that project on how digital resource developers conceive of and define their collections. Based on content analysis of collection registry records, survey and interview data, and focus groups, we identify collection definition trends including a broadening of target audiences, elaboration of subject representation, and a lack of clearly defined selection criteria. Our findings reveal high variability and ambiguity in the collection construct. We discuss how the concept of collection is being continuously defined through the processes of digital resource development and federation and how rapidly changing conceptualizations are likely to impact adoption, tailoring, and development of digital collections and their use.

https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/meet.14504301161

Collection definition in federated digital resource development

As digital library development begins to focus on interoperability and collection federation, resource developers need to be concerned with contributing to national and international collections, while not losing sight of the needs of institutions and user communities. The Digital Collections and Content (DCC) project aims to provide integrated access to IMLS National Leadership Grant (NLG) digital collections through a centralized collection registry and metadata repository. While technical development proceeds on the repository, our research team is investigating how collections and items can best be represented to meet the needs of both service providers and diverse user communities. This paper presents results on metadata and collection representation practices based on survey data, interviews, and content analysis. Despite Dublin Core's prevalence and ease of use, problems with field richness and consistency of application persist, in part because of the distinct cultures of description that have evolved in different kinds of cultural heritage institutions. Moreover, the concept of a digital collection is widely unsettled among resource developers. This has important implications for central repositories, if, as we hypothesize, the strategic foregrounding and backgrounding of collection-level metadata proves critical for navigation and interpretation of information in large-scale federated collections.

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Metadata Practices and Implications for Federated Collections

We are investigating how resource developers can best represent digital-collections and items to meet the requirements of divergent service providers and user communities. Our first goal is to establish a baseline that describes the institutions, collections, and initial metadata schemes of Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grant (NLG) digital collection projects. This research is a component of the larger Digital Collections and Content (DCC) Project, funded by IMLS to build a collection registry and metadata repository for the NLG collections. Collection registries organize large aggregations of digital content from multiple institutions to make relevant resources easier to find and more visible to end-users [1]. As we gain in interoperability, we do not want to lose advances that have been made in adaptation and access for communities of users. Library collection functions that attend to user-based criteria are key to the success of distributed digital collection services [2]. Variations in metadata standards reflect the variant roles and use of digital objects and the different aims and practices of resource developers and their constituent user communities.

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Ellen M. Knutson

Papers

Is 'Quality' Metadata 'Shareable' Metadata? The Implications of Local Metadata Practice on Federated Collections

Collection definition in federated digital resource development

Metadata Practices and Implications for Federated Collections

Tracking metadata use for digital collections

Collection Definition in Digital Resource Development