Metadata for Digital Content at the Library of Congress
Jane Mandelbaum
Information Technology Services
Library of Congress
May 2009
What Do Users Want?• “What are users looking for at LC?”
• Digital Content Objects: Historical content, exhibits, archived website crawls, legislative documents, catalog records.
• Need to focus on “findability” and “usability” of digital content objects
Where Do We Want to Go?• Establish common metadata elements.
• Focus on consistent metadata.
• Explore tools for metadata remediation.
• Keep metadata modular and reusable.
What Will This Do For Us?
• Separate content and metadata so we can identify and use them separately
• Improve consistency of metadata for processing
• Improve LC’s federated faceted search
• Improve reusability and interfaces
Building on Existing Foundations
• LC leadership in Standards
• Metadata schemas for existing digital content
• Set of use cases
• Search and discovery vision of a new site: World Digital Library (access points and presentation options)
Use Cases
• Concrete examples of “what we could do if we have better metadata”
• Examples: • Navigation by place, date, type of item, topic• Reuse for different audiences, in different
combinations and delivery mechanisms• Metadata focused on inter-operability• Identify what content items are available, and in what
form.
Use Cases: Search and Discovery
• Search and Discovery– Better Faceted Searching
– More Content for Federated Searching
– Better and More Precise Access Points and Navigation
Use Cases: Target Specific Needs
• Targeted Improvements (examples)– Create standardized metadata for videos
for internal use and external providers– Focus on collection sets of interest to
teachers and educators – Improve access to digital content in LC
web pages
How are we doing it?
• Establish a master set of metadata elements commonly used among digital projects
• Annotate the master set list with preferred practices for metadata content
Create metadata profiles for projects, detailing which elements are used and how they are encoded
• Identify where metadata remediation is needed and attempt to improve specific access points (manual and automated techniques)
Useful References
– Information Architecture: Peter Morville et al.– www.loc.gov/standards– www.wdl.org– Future Directions in Metadata Remediation for
Metadata Aggregators: Digital Library Federation
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