1. Assessment of Metadata Remediation Efforts
Jenn Riley Metadata Librarian
Indiana University Digital Library Program

2. 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

3. Metadata Enhancement and OAI Workshop
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

4. One size does not fit all for metadata enhancement activities
(a la DCMI Type)
(syntax normalization)
(syntax normalization, plus ?)
(form? style?)
Dates
Resource Type
Names
Subject
Genre
Factual
Interpretive
easy?
hard?
What about geography?
Metadata Enhancement and OAI Workshop

5. 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

6. Metadata Enhancement and OAI Workshop
Woof!
Metadata Enhancement and OAI Workshop