The wonderful thing about the digital age is the sheer
magnitude of information and resources available for exploring, discovering,
and learning. The greatest challenge is
the sheer magnitude of information and resources available for exploring,
discovering, and learning.
For information seekers, it’s daunting sifting through the
endless amounts of information and frustrating trying to decipher between good
information and fallacies. It’s
aggravating when in that search, they find themselves trudging through murky
paths that lead to dead ends.
For content providers, it’s a constant battle trying to assist
seekers in locating their carefully curated items. It’s a game of hot and cold as they strive to
lead them from one step to the next in their exploration. It involves massaging and manipulating
information in an effort to optimize placement within major search
engines. It often requires finding
collaborative arrangements in order to aggregate their content with others to
effectively expand their reach.
Metadata librarians are on the front lines in this
battle. They represent an
under-appreciated, yet critically important cog in the battle to make
information openly available. We are
apt to appreciate the content, but slow to remember the individuals who spend
countless hours sifting through the items, digging up information, and
masterfully organizing that information to provide seekers with the best chance
of discovery.
In an effort to understand this process better, I reached
out to a couple of top-notch Metadata Librarians to provide some insights and
best practices for creating discoverable metadata.
Here are some tips:
1. Think globally
Success in content curation and delivery is
often measured by the expanse of its reach.
Fortunately, the Internet knows no boundaries. Once online, content can theoretically reach
a global audience. However, in order for
those items to be found, it is important to consider whether or not the
descriptive data is understandable to a non-local person. Think about what additional context may be
included in order to clarify as much detail as possible.
Be sure to take precautions as to which
fields would most appropriately contain that information. An overly descriptive “Title” field may
hinder rather than help your cause. The
“Description” field would be the most appropriate for extensive detail and
context.
2. Pay attention to detail
“You have to be a good editor with a sharp eye and
determination to produce high quality results. Nobody’s perfect, but you have
to be willing to learn and adapt and make things right.”
Part of that adaptation may require looking
in greater depth into the context of the item.
For example, you may have an old photo with some metadata wrapped around
it. Upon further inspection of the subjects
within the photo, you may find that the particular dress standards may not be
consistent with the date. Or, you may
notice landmarks or other clues that might provide additional detail related to
the location at which it was created.
Further investigation and information finding may be merited.
In addition, it is important to inspect your
metadata before loading it into your digital library platform to ensure
consistency within metadata fields. For
example, are all names in a consistent format such as Last Name, First Name or
are there some that start with the first name?
Given that much of the information contained has been entered by humans,
human error is common. Most digital
library systems will allow for the creation of collection-based controlled
vocabularies to help in this inspection.
However, it is still worth a glance-over to ensure all is correct.
3. Adhere to professionally accepted standards
“Keeping track of standards and having a
good understanding of how metadata can be enhanced, both at a local level and
in a discovery system can be very useful. As we move towards linked data, using
linked data compatible controlled vocabularies becomes more and more important.”
One of the greatest challenges with the Open
Archives Initiative has been the consistency, or lack thereof, of field names,
terms, references, etc. Generally
speaking, people are quite inconsistent in how they describe or reference
things. One data set may describe
Baltimore, Maryland as Baltimore, MD..
Another may spell it out completely.
Likewise, the author Charles Dickens may be referred to as “Dickens,
Charles”, or “Dickens, Charles J.H.” or “Charles John Huffam Dickens”, or
“Dickens, Charles John Huffam”. There
are a myriad of ways to describe the same thing. Researches are often challenged by these
inconsistencies. Standardized methods
are always appreciated and greatly enhance efficiencies in research.
For data aggregation and harvesting
purposes, it is important to seek a standardized method for describing certain
aspects of your items. The Library of
Congress is a great place to start when seeking standardized terms. You can find standardized subject headings,
name authorities, etc. to assist in your efforts. For field names, standards have been created
to encourage consistency. The most
common, referred to as Dublin Core, was developed as part of the Dublin CoreMetadata Initiative (DCMI).
Staying current on all standards is
essential to success in this area.
Anne-Marie Hamilton-Brehm mentioned:
“Access to collections depends on adherence
to standard naming and coding conventions and file formats. You not only have
to research and apply standards, but you have to update your knowledge
continuously over time as standards and markup languages evolve.”
4. Focus on
Curation
According to Anne-Marie Hamilton Brehm:
“Placing
a collection and its materials in historical context with engaging descriptions
helps you connect with your patrons. Providing additional details about images,
documents, and other historical materials will encourage visitors to browse and
may inspire them to donate related historical materials.”
The bottom line is, the more information and
context you can provide, the more engaging will be your materials. That engagement will open up the minds of
your patrons toward additional discovery and, hopefully, contribution of
additional information and materials.
5. Leverage Technology
There exists a wide array of technological
solutions to assist in the process of digital collection creation and curation. Here are a few items worth mentioning.
Digital
Library Platforms
There are many platforms available for
archiving and displaying your digital content.
They are quite diverse and are called different things depending upon
their core functionalities. They may be
referred to as Digital Library Systems, Digital Asset Management Systems,
Internal Repositories, Digital Management Systems, etc.
If your primary intention is to make your
digital collections available for public consumption and dissemination, a
Digital Library platform should do the trick.
In deciding on a platform, first and
foremost, pick a system that is user-friendly and engaging on the part of the
patron and the librarian. Digital
librarians should be focused on what they do best—the creation and curation of
digital content. Loading the materials
into your online platform should be of minor concern. Patrons should find their way into your
collections and around them with ease and simplicity. A buttery-smooth experience will only enhance
their engagement and magnify the appreciation for and contribution to your
various collections.
Many librarians are concerned about the
technological expertise required to implement some of these systems. Particularly since high-quality IT talent is
difficult to come by, particularly within a library setting. An open-source solution, though appealing,
may be too difficult to implement and manage as a result.
An easy-to-use, out-of-the-box solution
worth considering is Simple Digital Library or SimpleDL. They are focused on simplicity and ease of
use for librarians and patrons alike. Implementation
is immediate and the ability to customize and tailor toward a specific look and
feel is slick and easy. They have a
quality staff that is able to design and implement a personalized interface for
you at a very reasonable cost.
“SimpleDL has given us the ideal platform
to present our digital image gallery—beautiful display, easy-to-use interface
on both the front-end and back-end, and great tech support.”
Spreadsheets
As a metadata librarian, it is of paramount
importance to familiarize yourself and become expert in the use of spreadsheet
applications.
The beauty with spreadsheets is that they
effectively divide and categorize all of the metadata in an easy to use, easy
to review interface. In addition, they
improve efficiencies tremendously through their inherent fill-down tricks and
various functions.
As an example, recently I was creating some
metadata for some individual census records and realized that the best title
for each item was going to be the last name followed by the first name and age. The trouble was that there were hundreds of
records and the data I wanted to include in the title field were in individual columnar
fields. It would have taken me hours to
type each title by hand.
Instead, I utilized a concatenation
function in Microsoft Excel to bring all the data from the respective fields
into a new field named “Title”.
The data looked like this before:
The function I used to bring the data from
columns E, F, and G together into D was:
=E2&”, “&F2&”, age “&G2
The result was as follows:
By copying and pasting the formula down to
the bottom of the list, I was able to quickly and easily have a title field
that I wanted.
This, of course, is one of many tricks that
may be utilized with many spreadsheet applications to make working with data
easier and more efficient.
Other
Tools
Anna Neatrour offers a couple more
technologies worth considering when working with Metadata:
XSLT
“As I’ve been working as a metadata
librarian, I’ve grown to appreciate the ways that metadata can be extracted and
transformed through leveraging things like XSLT. If I was starting from the
beginning, I would have learned XSLT earlier because I would have been much
more efficient in some of my earlier work!”
OpenRefine
“Tools such as OpenRefine are becoming an
essential part of a metadata librarian’s work now. Practices for descriptive
metadata often evolve over time, and it is often time consuming to go back and
review and enhance metadata in older collections. Having clear documentation
and training for people developing descriptive metadata is key in getting it
right the first time.”
If you have any other tips or tricks you would like to share with the community, please comment below. We would love to get your thoughts and feedback on this important topic.
