Managing metadata quality in institutional repositories

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Managing metadata quality in institutional
repositories

• Jane BartonCentre for Digital Library
  ResearchUniversity of Strathclyde

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Overview

• Defining metadata quality
• Managing metadata quality
• Designing metadata workflow
• Early experiences
• Issues to resolve

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Defining metadata quality

• Quality is defined by its absence
• errors, omissions and ambiguities
• Quality is fitness for purpose
• functionality and interoperability
• Aspects of metadata quality
• structure, semantics and syntax
• Metadata requirements
• local and community-level requirements

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Defining metadata quality for IRs

• What is the purpose of an institutional
  repository?
• Storage for various content types and associated
  services
• resource discovery
• access(Open Access Movement, Learning Object
  Economy)
• preservation
• asset management (RAE, Freedom of Information)
• What does this mean in terms of functionality?
• And in terms of interoperability?

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Factors influencing metadata quality

• What is the repository for, locally and within
  the wider context? Does this give rise to any
  conflicts?
• What type of objects will the repository contain?
  How will they be used? And by whom?
• What functionality is required locally? How will
  it be interfaced? What entry points will be used?
• What is required for interoperability? Are
  requirements formal or informal, direct or
  indirect?
• Will access restrictions be imposed locally?And
  in the wider context?
• Will metadata be meaningful withinaggregations
  of various kinds?

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Defining metadata quality for IRs

• What are the implications of diversity of purpose
  for metadata quality?
• diverse and sometimes conflicting metadata
  requirements
• resources unlikely to be available to meet
  requirements in full
• local factors determine the quality that can be
  achieved
• Although repositories may have much in
  common,one size does not fit all!
• Hence we must define and manage metadataquality
  on an individual basis

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Managing metadata quality

• The quality cycle
• determine level of quality required
• test
• determine nature of gap and how to close it
• implement changes
• retest
• Quality assurance quality by design
• elements, records, repositories, aggregations
• tools and techniques
• Embedding QA in metadata creation processes
• workflow

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Managing metadata quality in IRs

• Library catalogues
• well-defined purpose, stable context
• cataloguing tightly controlled, QA embedded
• community-wide approach to optimise quality
• Institutional repositories
• poorly defined and diverse purpose, evolving
  context
• metadata creation distributed, collaborative or
  both
• potential of community-wide approach asyet
  underdeveloped

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Designing metadata workflow
Barton, J. Robertson, R.J. Designing workflows
for quality assured metadata. CETIS Metadata
Digital Repositories SIG Meeting, Edinburgh, 10th
March 2005.
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Factors influencing workflow design

• What resources are available locally? Who will be
  involved? What skills do they have?
• How can these resources be used to best effect?
• Are resources available within the wider
  community? Does their use require compromises to
  be made, and if so, is it worth it?
• Are resources sufficient to produce the required
  metadata quality, and if not, what are the
  priorities?
• What level of commitment exists locallyand in
  the wider community?

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Early experiences IRs

• Self-archiving lower take-up and higher costs
  than expected
• IRs not just about improving access to scholarly
  outputs
• Library assumptions about metadata quality may
  not be appropriate in wider context
• Movement/transformation of metadata beyond IRs
  not well understood
• Flexible software solutions needed to support
  complex workflows

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Early experiences LORs

• Creation of good quality metadata is non-trivial
  and expensive
• Library approach may offer partial solutions in
  some areas
• Little real understanding of metadata issues
  within e-learning community
• Resource-sharing model is complex and still
  evolving
• Movement/transformation of both LOs and their
  metadata adds further complexity

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A typology of factors

• Repository-level factors
• Does the repository have a subject specialism? Is
  it required to interoperate with the local VLE?
• Object-level factors
• Can objects be repurposed? Is their use
  restricted?
• Metadata-level factors
• Does participation in the wider community impose
  specific requirements? Is training available?
• Local factors
• Is there a strategic commitment to therepository?

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Issues to resolve

• Repository-level issues
• need a better understanding of what an individual
  repository is for, both locally and as part of a
  wider system of repositories and services
• Object-level issues
• need a better understanding of how objects are
  created, used, repurposed, managed
• Metadata-level issues
• need to integrate and optimise metadatacreation,
  enhancement and QA processes throughout the wider
  system