This article evaluates practices on metadata quality control in digital repositories and collections using an online survey of cataloging and metadata professionals in the United States. The study examines (1) the perceived importance of metadata quality, (2) metadata quality evaluation criteria and issues, and (3) mechanisms for building quality assurance into the metadata creation process. The survey finds wide recognition of the essential role of metadata quality assurance. Accuracy and consistency are prioritized as the main criteria for metadata quality evaluation. Metadata semantics greatly affects consistent and accurate metadata application. Strong awareness of metadata quality correlates with the widespread adoption of various quality control mechanisms, such as staff training, manual review, metadata guidelines, and metadata generation tools. And yet, metadata guidelines are used less frequently as a quality assurance mechanism in digital collections involving multiple institutions.

Metadata Quality Control in Digital Repositories and Collections: Criteria, Semantics, and Mechanisms

With the emergence of digital collections in libraries, museums, and other cultural institutions, catalogers are redefining their roles by participating in digital projects that involve creating, maintaining, and developing nontraditional metadata records. This article will provide a discussion of how catalogers are ensuring that the cataloging legacies of quality control, authority control, and creative cataloging become important components in the creation of descriptive metadata for digital projects.

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Transferring Cataloging Legacies into Descriptive Metadata Creation in Digital Projects: Catalogers’ Perspective

In an effort to identify an automated means of updating and standardizing metadata within a digital collection, the University of Utah's Marriott Library and Backstage Library Works partnered to develop a service that would replicate the benefits of an automated MARC21 authority control project for digital library metadata. This paper will discuss how the process to update MARC21 bibliographic records was adapted to update data encoded in XML. Future directions for this project will include taking a close look at how it can be used to link URIs with strings of data in order to prepare for a linked data environment.

Authority Control in a Digital Repository: Preparing for Linked Data

This bibliography lists citations of English-language articles, books and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet. Most sources have been published from 1990 through 2010; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 1990 are also included.

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Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010

Advances in scientific data management, discovery, dissemination, and sharing are changing the manner in which scientific studies are being conducted and repurposed. Data-intensive scientific practices increasingly require data management related services not available in existing digital libraries. Complicating the issue are the diversity of functional requirements and content in scientific domains as well as scientists’ lack of expertise in information and library science.
Researchers that utilize simulation and experimentation systems need digital libraries to maintain datasets, input configurations, results, analyses, and related documents. A digital library may be integrated with simulation infrastructures to provide automated support for research components, e.g., simulation interfaces to models, data warehouses, simulation applications, computational resources, and storage systems. Managing and provisioning simulation content allows streamlined experimentation, collaboration, discovery, and content reuse within a simulation community. Formal definitions of this class of digital libraries provide a foundation for producing a software toolkit and the semi-automated generation of digital library instances.
We present a generic, component-based SIMulation-supporting Digital Library (SimDL) framework. The framework is formally described and provides a deployable set of domain-free services, schema-based domain knowledge representations, and extensible lower and higher level service abstractions. Services in SimDL are specialized for semi-structured simulation content and large-scale data producing infrastructures, as exemplified in data storage, indexing, and retrieval service implementations. Contributions to the scientific community include previously unavailable simulation-specific services, e.g., incentivizing public contributions, semi-automated content curating, and memoizing simulation-generated data products. The practicality of SimDL is demonstrated through several case studies in computational epidemiology and network science as well as performance evaluations.

Epidemiology experimentation and simulation management through scientific digital libraries

A survey on metadata conducted at the end of 2007 received over 400 answers from 49 countries all over the world. It helped the authors to identify major issues and concerns regarding metadata that should be addressed in the IFLA Guidelines for Digital Libraries. The questionnaire included a question of the roles respondents may have, and five questions of the major concerns in any project that relates to metadata, regarding design and planning of digital projects, element set standards, data contents in a record, authority files and controlled vocabularies, and metadata encoding. Findings from the survey are reported and a workflow chart is included in this paper.

Jaesun Lee

Papers

Metadata Decisions for Digital Libraries: A Survey Report