metadata clean-up: before or after migration? · 2020-05-20 · rights statement work was done...

Metadata Clean-up: Before or After Migration?

Kristen Merryman

Digital Projects Librarian

North Carolina Digital Heritage Center

kmerryman@unc.edu

Agenda• What do we mean by metadata clean-up?• Metadata and ContentDM

• Migration process out of ContentDM and into TIND

• Impact of migration on our metadata – including clean-up decisions

• Metadata and TIND

• Maintenance is forever

North Carolina Digital Heritage Center

• 273 partner institutions from across North Carolina• Institution types include public library local history rooms, museums,

historic societies, community colleges, and alumni associations• Wide variety of materials freely available online at

http://www.digitalnc.org/• Material is constantly being added• Funding comes from IMLS via State Library of NC

http://www.digitalnc.org/

What do we mean when we say metadata cleanup?

● Common mistakes - misspellings, misplaced punctuation, incorrectly formatted authority headings

● Incorrect information - names wrong, places wrong (often from user feedback)

● Mismatched file and metadata● Broader metadata changes - for example redoing metadata

to reflect trends such as work to create more equitable metadata or adding standardized rights statements to materials, value added work

Screenshot courtesy of colleagues at Duke University

1 2 3

OCLC business model change• Sunsetting self-hosted

CONTENTdm • Only supporting cloud

hosting

Staff dissatisfaction• Last update at least 2

years ago• Workarounds and band-

aids on the back end• User dissatisfaction = Our

dissatisfaction

User and partner dissatisfaction• Inconsistent or confusing

search results• General slowness or

service interruption• Difficulty obtaining PDFs,

scaled images, printable files

“Why Invenio / TIND?”

- Improved search engine results- Improved user interface for viewing individual items- Open source but has a hosted solution as well- Can handle a lot of text-based content- Gives us the ability to host the yearbook collection

with everything else- Back-end was a lot more powerful

Preparing for Migration

• Audited CONTENTdm fields• Learned MARC• Developed initial mapping• Worked with UNC Technical Services staff to

refine mappings• Learned more MARC• Edited with input from TIND

(avoiding system-reserved fields, aligning with global mappings)

• Finalized mapping• Used exported metadata database to

generate METS files with MARC crosswalked data From 1979 East Carolina University yearbook

Preparing for Migration

Pre-Migration Cleanup Project

Paused all other work for a month in December 2017 in anticipation of migrating to focus on doing some targeted cleanup in ContentDM

Frozen in Time- Due to the amount of work to

prep the collection before handing over for migration, we chose to freeze them in ContentDM.

- BUT - we did not fully stop our daily work of scanning and describing for our partners. For 7 months we continued to produce content that had no place to go.

- And - this meant for 9 months we stared at issues in the metadata that popped up but couldn’t be fixed!

Dealing with the Backlog

- Once the migration was complete, we still had 84 batches of images and description that needed to be put into TIND before going live.

• Benefits: learned the system really well before going fully into production

• Drawbacks: This did require essentially pausing all other work for a month. (for the second year in a row!)

Metadata clean-up in TIND● The 9 months of pause for the collection meant a list of known issues

once we had full access to TIND● Differences between the two systems meant changing how some

objects were structured and necessitated a full rework of the metadata ○ One project, which had over 1,300 records in it (many multi-page)

was redone completely after we moved into TIND due to a system corruption that created orphan records in ContentDM

○ TIND doesn’t allow for record hierarchy at all so many compound objects have had to be split apart and redescribed since the migration to overcome that

● New initiatives to bring our metadata in line with current practices ○ Rights statement work was done before and after migration - the

work after migration was significantly easier

Editing metadata in TIND

Editing metadata in TIND

Editing metadata in TIND

Metadata work is iterative - cleanup never really ends!

Margery N. Monteith cleaning

glass. From Sept. 1976 Firestone

News Loray Digital Archive

Questions?Thank you!

Cedar Mountain Community Club scrapbook, 1982 Transylvania County Library

kmerryman@unc.edu