Metadata for You and Me: Moving Towards Shareable Metadata. Jenn Riley (Indiana University Bloomington) and Sarah Shreeves (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Digital library development, particularly over the past five years, has focused increasingly on the aggregation of digital content and/or the metadata describing such content. Communication protocols like the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) and common metadata encoding schemas such as Dublin Core have facilitated the ease with which metadata from multiple sources can be pooled together. However, numerous studies, particularly within the OAI-PMH context, have discussed the difficulty in building services beyond search and access over metadata aggregations because of the poor metadata quality and shareability. Metadata often is not interoperable; that is, it does not make sense or loses crucial context when taken out of its local environment. We will discuss two Digital Library Federation initiatives we are currently involved in which encourage the creation of shareable metadata:The presentation will cover the rationale for sharing metadata, the common problems seen in metadata aggregations, and some proposed solutions as typified in the two initiatives described above.
- Best Practices for Shareable Metadata, a community-developed set of guidelines and recommendations for authoring shareable metadata; and
- The MODS Implementation Guidelines, a set of specific recommendations for creating MODS records meant to be shared with others.