Dublin Core Metadata Harvested Through OAI-PMH

Abstract

ABSTRACT. The introduction in 2001 of the Open Archives InitiativeProtocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) increased interest in and awareness of metadata quality issues relevant to digital library interoperability and the use of harvested metadata to build "union catalogs" Amy S. Jackson (E-mail: amyjacks@uiuc.edu

Metadata for Special Collections in CONTENTdm: How to Improve Interoperability of Unique Fields Through OAI-PMH

“…CONTENTdm implementations are especially well suited for this sort of examination because the application gives implementers license to add locally defined metadata fields and the freedom to then map or not map these local fields to Dublin Core however the implementer sees fit for purposes of metadata record export. This paper stems in part from a finding described in the article Dublin Core Metadata Harvested through OAI-PMH (Jackson, Han, Groetsch, Mustafoff, & Cole, 2008). As described in this earlier paper, we found that "native metadata records are rich in meaning in their own environment, but lose richness in the aggregated environment due to the mapping errors and misunderstanding and misuse of Dublin Core elements" (Jackson et al, 2008, p. 18).…”

“…Additionally, in part because of the widespread adoption of OAI-PMH within the library community (Brogan, 2006), which mandates Simple Dublin Core as the minimum requirement when exposing metadata to aggregators, the quality of harvested Dublin Core metadata has garnered much attention in several venues (Lagoze, 2004;Tennant, 2004;Ward, 2004;Hutt & Riley, 2005;Shreeves, Knutson, Stvilia, Palmer, Twidale, & Cole, 2005;Jackson et al, 2008). The issue of improving metadata, while using Simple Dublin Core as a minimum requirement in the OAI-PMH environment, has created a host of problems because Simple Dublin Core is viewed as semantically limited and has a flat structure.…”

“…Research on the importance of creating and providing interoperable metadata (i.e., sharable metadata) has evolved considerably in recent years, spurred on by the release and growing use of the Open Archives Initiatives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), 1 3 and disseminations from multiple recent and ongoing research projects in this domain (Bruce & Hillmann, 2004;Stvilia, Gasser, Twidale, Shreeves, & Cole, 2004;Shreeves et al, 2006;Elings & Weibel, 2007;Jackson et al, 2008). In addition, several projects built around metadata sharing have released best practices for creating interoperable metadata, for example, Best Practices for OAI Data Provider Implementations and Shareable Metadata (2005), 4 DLF MODS Implementation Guidelines for Cultural Heritage Materials (2006), 5 and Collaborative Digitization Program's Dublin Core Metadata Best Practices (2006).…”

“…The issue of improving metadata, while using Simple Dublin Core as a minimum requirement in the OAI-PMH environment, has created a host of problems because Simple Dublin Core is viewed as semantically limited and has a flat structure. In addition, problems entailing semantic ambiguity/vagueness and semantic overlaps in certain elements of Dublin Core, for example, <type> and <format>, <source>, and <relation> (Park, 2006;Jackson et al, 2008;Park & Childress, 2009), also contribute to metadata quality issues when records are aggregated in service provider environments. Yet researchers also have found that even in the context of Simple Dublin Core, aggregated metadata quality can be improved by creating, from the outset, metadata intended to support interoperability (Bruce & Hillmann, 2004;Shreeves et al, 2006) or by the consistent and correct mapping of custom local metadata to Dublin Core and/or other widely adopted standards (Park, 2005;Jackson et al, 2008).…”

Metadata for semantic and social applications<br />DC- 2008 Berlin

“…Object types and formats are sometimes conflated, even within the same sentence, in the Description field, as well as in Objects Represented. This lack of disambiguation between type and format is a known metadata quality problem in digital object description (see, for example, Jackson et al, 2008).…”