Assessment of Metadata Remediation Efforts

Jenn RileyMetadata LibrarianIndiana University Digital Library Program

Metadata Enhancement and OAI Workshop

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General approach to assessment Traditional library approach

Measure inter-indexer consistency Count errors Record focus

For this project, I’ll argue User & task focus Define accuracy in terms of functionality achieved

Metadata Enhancement and OAI Workshop

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Why that approach?

Functionalities we’re thinking about aren’t supported well by traditional library structures and vocabularies High-level browsing Genre access

“Ground truth” doesn’t really exist for things like “subject” and “genre”

We need to figure out where human effort is most useful

Metadata Enhancement and OAI Workshop

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One size does not fit all for metadata enhancement activities

Factual Interpretive

Dates

(syntax normalization)

Resource Type

(a la DCMI Type)

Names

(syntax normalization, plus ?)

Subject Genre

(form? style?)

What about geography?

easy? hard?

Metadata Enhancement and OAI Workshop

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Very preliminary possible metrics Syntax normalization: what functionality can we

provide on the records after syntax normalization? More interpretive tasks: do the resources retrieved

in response to a query match user expectations? All: how confident are we in the results of the

automatic enhancement? Need actual numbers at some point

To figure out how well services will work Think about pre-human involvement vs. post-human

involvement

Metadata Enhancement and OAI Workshop

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Woof!