Opening Access to Fresh Air\u27s Archives

Producing a daily public radio show while preserving past content and metadata for public access is both time-consuming and difficult, particularly for a small staff untrained in archival techniques. Over the past decade, however, Fresh Air with Terry Gross has made a concerted effort to preserve its collection, by digitizing and standardizing the metadata in its archives in order to ensure future public access to its material. In this paper, we detail why Fresh Air’s archives and other audio-dominant collections deserve such urgent attention, and present a case study for how a small public radio institution successfully managed an archival project and rethought its asset management strategy

I'm In Ur Bookmarks, Stealin' Ur Tags!: Closed Communities and Their Influence On Consistent Vocabularies In User Developed Folksonomies

Metadata technology allowing users to create and modify their own personal descriptive metadata for World Wide Web pages has also given rise to similarly-interested communities of web users registered at sites such as Delicious, who are refining their own content vocabularies. This research examined these vocabularies to determine if trends, patterns and unspoken vocabulary policy exists amongst the users. This study extracted data from Delicious' URL history pages and analyzed the data via content analysis. The research found that vocabulary consistency exists within the community, despite individually and independently generated data. The analysis was based specifically ontype and content descriptor identifiers for the Stargate: Atlantis fandom, which is a community of fans of the Sci Fi television show

Semiotic Principles for Metadata Auditing and Evaluation

This is an electronic version of an article published in Cataloging and Classification Quarterly. This article is available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01639374.2015.1133750Metadata auditing is a common practice used to assess quality by drawing on a selection of documents to create a representative sample of the corpus. This article examines common techniques involved in auditing and argues that underlying semiotic principles should be considered before remediation and transformation work are undertaken. This article provides an inquiry into the structural nature of metadata, records, and corpora to analyze the semiotic processes and boundaries that can affect audits. Suggestions for effective auditing practices are offered as well as what can be obfuscated when transformations are undertaken without concern for the sign-functions of metadata

Developing a metadata best practices model: the experience of the Colorado State University Libraries

Final, peer-reviewed manuscript.The Metadata Best Practices Task Force at the Colorado State University (CSU) Libraries developed a core set of metadata elements and an accompanying data dictionary to facilitate a coordinated metadata management approach for a central digital repository of diverse digital objects. This article describes the rationale for the Task Force and the process used for its work following a look at the background of digitization and past metadata practices at CSU. The article includes a literature review on institutional metadata projects and examples, and it ends with a description of the Task Force's ongoing work and plans for future assessment

Enhancing Search and Browse Using Automated Clustering of Subject Metadata

The Web puzzle of online information resources often hinders end-users from effective and efficient access to these resources. Clustering resources into appropriate subject-based groupings may help alleviate these difficulties, but will it work with heterogeneous material? The University of Michigan and the University of California Irvine joined forces to test automatically enhancing metadata records using the Topic Modeling algorithm on the varied OAIster corpus. We created labels for the resulting clusters of metadata records, matched the clusters to an in-house classification system, and developed a prototype that would showcase methods for search and retrieval using the enhanced records. Results indicated that while the algorithm was somewhat time-intensive to run and using a local classification scheme had its drawbacks, precise clustering of records was achieved and the prototype interface proved that faceted classification could be powerful in helping end-users find resources.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/58766/1/07hagedorn.pd

Metadata Analysis of the Montana Department of Environmental Quality\u27s Reference Stream Project Datasets

This Master’s Thesis examines certain aspects of the frequently incongruous relationship in the State of Montana between the natural science of water quality measurement and the actual practices to which water quality management research is put. These discordances can be the source of misunderstandings about the purposes and uses for which data were collected. Moreover, miscues regarding the sharing of information among stakeholders have become more significant as adaptive and shared management programs continue to expand. At the core of this study are assessments of the value of water quality data generated by the Montana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) and surveys of some of the potential consumers of water quality data generated by the Montana DEQ. Datasets examined are part of an ongoing project at the Montana DEQ known as the “Reference Stream Project.” Research was framed using two basic questions: (1) Are Reference Stream Project data supported by an appropriate metadata framework?; and (2) In general, are water quality data produced by the Montana DEQ socially and politically useful or relevant to consumers of water quality information? Question 1 is addressed using a structural analysis of existing metadata from the Reference Stream Project to infer overall reliability and usefulness of data quality for these types of water quality data. Question 2 is examined using social inquiry of water resource stakeholders who are potentially interested in water quality data, in order to evaluate the usefulness and relevance of state generated water quality data. Question 1 is the primary focus of the study. The research identified a noteworthy demand among stakeholders to collaborate and share data with each other, which can be accomplished, in part by the following steps: (1) increasing metadata structure; and, (2) encouraging joint fact finding processes to be undertaken by the greater cohort of water quality stakeholders in Montana. This study reaffirmed the need for water resource managers to be critical of how water quality data are stored and described, in order to create reliable, useful, and inclusive management processes

Moving towards shareable metadata

A focus of digital libraries, particularly since the advent of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, is aggregating from multiple collections metadata describing digital content. However, the quality and interoperability of the metadata often prevents such aggregations from offering much more than very simple search and discovery services. Shareable metadata is metadata which can be understood and used outside of its local environment by aggregators to provide more advanced services. This paper describes shareable metadata, its characteristics, and its importance to digital library development, as well as barriers and challenges to its implementation