Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals:

In Summer 2016, the Illinois Data Bank, the new data repository at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was launched. This paper will cover the development of the repository’s metadata s...

Meaningful Data Sharing: Developing the Illinois Data Bank Metadata Framework

Consortial geospatial data communities, such as the OpenGeoPortal federation and the GeoBlacklight initiative, facilitate contextualized discovery and promote metadata sharing to disperse hosting and preservation responsibilities across institutions. However, the challenges of communal metadata are manifold; they include proliferating standards, varying levels of completeness, mutable technology infrastructures, and uneven availability of human labor. Drawing from literature on metadata quality control, we outline a procedure for “scoring” GeoBlacklight records to establish a Domain Specific Language for metadata best practices. We propose strategies for authorship and management conducive to functionally interoperable geospatial metadata, that is versioned and enhanceable by the collective.

/pdf/consortial-geospatial-data-collection-toward-standards-and-4fd548bil4.pdf

Consortial Geospatial Data Collection: Toward Standards and Processes for Shared GeoBlacklight Metadata

This paper describes an investigation into whether institutional repositories at member libraries of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) provide publicly available metadata documentation via the repositories’ websites. The study compares the results of a September 2017 survey with findings from a review of ARL institutional repository websites. Slightly more than half of ARL institutional repositories do provide metadata documentation. Implications of the results are discussed, including specific research questions for moving forward. A call to reimagine documentation as a tool of transparency is delivered.

Metadata Documentation Practices at ARL Institutional Repositories

This paper provides a case study on remediating electronic theses and dissertations (ETD) metadata at the University of Houston Libraries. The authors provide an overview of the team’s efforts to revise existing ETD metadata in its institutional repository as part of their commitment to aligning ETD records with the Texas Digital Library Descriptive Metadata Guidelines for Electronic Theses and Dissertations, Version 2.0 (TDL guidelines, version 2). The paper reviews the existing literature on metadata quality and ETD metadata practices, noting how their case study adds one of the first documented cases of ETD metadata remediation. The metadata upgrade process is described, with close attention to the tools and workflows developed to complete the remediation. The authors conclude the paper with a discussion of lessons learned, the project’s limitations, future plans, and the emerging needs of metadata remediation work.

/pdf/a-case-study-of-etd-metadata-remediation-at-the-university-466drldcks.pdf

A Case Study of ETD Metadata Remediation at the University of Houston Libraries

This article documents the steps taken to assess metadata errors within the IDEALS repository. It describes the workflows established to create accurate and consistent metadata, focusing especially...

Seth Robbins

Papers

Achieving and maintaining metadata quality: Toward a sustainable workflow for the IDEALS institutional repository