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 Digital Content Objects: Historical content, exhibits, archived website crawls, legislative documents, catalog records.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 LCs 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. – – –Future Directions in Metadata Remediation for Metadata Aggregators: Digital Library Federation

Questions? Jane Mandelbaum Library of Congress