Reading #9

Park, J. R., & Tosaka, Y. (2010).  Metadata quality control in digital repositories and collections: Criteria, semantics, and mechanisms. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 48(8), 696-715.

A systematic assessment of practices and issues that affect the quality of metadata in digital repositories and collections is reviewed.  The researchers distributed a web-based survey to approximately 600 participants, mostly heads of cataloging and technical services, via mailing lists relevant to the field.  A total of 303 people completed the survey.  The results of the surveys can be categorized in the following three ways:  perceived importance of metadata quality control, criteria in use to measure metadata quality, and the utilization of quality control mechanisms in digital repositories.  Of note, the study found that metadata semantics is perceived to be less important than content standards for quality control.  This contrasts with 45% and 41% of respondents stating that semantic overlaps and ambiguities, respectively, are the two most significant factors that arise in the application of Dublin Core for their collections.  This study emphasizes the need for a strong awareness of content-based metadata quality control in collaboration with metadata guidelines to guarantee consistency in resource description within and across digital collections. 

Week 14 &15: Finishing up

So, these past two weeks I have not done much work because I have basically finished up my hours.  I have been coming in about once a week, and those hours may end up counting towards my internship next semester. 
Last week, week of 11/26, I came to the Metadata Working Group meeting to discuss the findings of the survey.  We received 13 responses, which was great!  Based on the survey results we further refined the core set and also made the following conclusions:
          1. There is not much of a unique cataloging emphasis.
          2. The primary goal of the collections/collection managers is end-user discovery.
          3. The majority of collections’ external records share some info with Photocat.
          4. The core set as presented in the survey is not satisfactory.

The following fields are all now (some more confidently than others) in the core:

• ABSTRACT
• CAPTION
• CITY
• CREATOR
• COPYRIGHT OWNER
• COPYRIGHT STATUS      
• COUNTRY
• FEATURED
• MODIFYING USER
• TITLE
• TOPICAL SUBJECT
• US STATE

Also, now I have begun compiling the core set definitions.  I have sent out an email to the members of the metadata subgroup and hope to hear some responses soon.

This week, week of 12/3, I came in on 12/6 to meet with Michelle to finalize everything and have her sign the evaluation.  After our meeting, I started some MODS mapping for the core fields that the group has decided upon.  So far, I have all of the mappings except for three fields: COPYRIGHT STATUS, FEATURED and MODIFYING USER. I am really not sure if it is possible to even map those to MODS, so I will wait until next semester to speak to Julie about it. 

So, I guess I am finished for this semester.  I really appreciate the opportunity I had working here and with the great people at the DLP.  I really am glad that I got a good, gentle introduction to XPath and XSL.  I hope to get further acquainted with them in the future.   I also learned that Schematron is not an easy thing to work on, especially when there are hangups.  It is not this ubiquitous thing like XML or TEI, so it was tough to find a good community to consult with when we were having problems.  It also was hard to find relevant literature on Schematron that wasn't just guidelines or documentation.  Hopefully, Schematron will catch on, because it is a really useful tool.  I will not wrap this up entirely, since I will be back in a few weeks to document another 4 1/2 months of my experiences at the Digital Library Program.