Harmonization of Metadata Standards

Once we move into the digital age, we are excited with the direct access to those great and high quality resources. ETDs, digital collection and digital archives are all available to a variety of researchers. The resource creators employ different metadata standards to facilitate the access and display resource in the most appropriate and descriptive way. Now most resources are created with meatadata schema Dublin Core, MODS, METS, EAD and MARC. Because of these various metadata standards, data transformation is becoming a huge challenge for metadata librarians in the digital age.

When I read the report PROLEARN by Network of Excellence in Professional Learning, I feel like we are in the darkness, it seems to me that the harmonization of metadata standards is never globally actualized. As we all know, now the most promising way to harmonize metadata standards is making crosswalks with XSLT among those various metadata schema. But according to the report, we are just like a starting point, even though we are not sure whether what we have done is correct or not, we still have a long way to go. Probably, what we really need is a standard like MARC21, which could be globally used to describe bibliographic information of a publication. Can we get that far? Before we get that far, I believe that creating crosswalks is still a feasible way to solve metadata interoperability.

ETDs Collection on DSpace

Washington College started to create digital collection of ETDs in 2007, now all Senior Capstone Experiences are available on DSpace. But senior students still do not submit their theses directly to DSpace, instead, they have to submit theses to blackboard or the library by email. Then the Metadata Librarian has to create metadata and deposit theses on DSpace one by one. I think this is time-consuming and very low efficient. Since the workflow of creating metadata for theses could be customized, so I can design a new default workflow for senior students to directly submit their theses to DSpace. This is the purpose that we choose DSpace as our digital repository originally.

Some faculty might question whether undergraduate students could deposit theses on their own. I would like to trust them. Through step-by-step guide and elaborately designed workflow, senior students will make it correctly and efficiently. Probably, I should work on designing such new default workflow model first, and then I will teach them how to use it. I wish we can make this happen by 2009.

Miller Library Presented Digital Collection of ETDs at CALD Annual Spring Meeting 2008

On April 11, 2008, College Librarian Dr. Ruth Shoge presented Washington College Digital Repository DSpace at CALD (Congress of Academic Library Directors of Maryland) Annual Spring Meeting 2008.

The Congress of Academic Library Directors (CALD) of Maryland is an organization open to library directors in post-secondary institutions in Maryland. Dr. Shoge made a presentation on “ DSpace, a place for senior thesis.” This year, CALD Annual Spring Meeting focuses on digitization and Maryland library digital projects. Presenters from University of Maryland, Towson University and Johns Hopkins University also shared their digital projects.

Dr. Shoge presented the rationale that we chose DSpace as our DdigiTool, and how the librarians made the collection of ETDs available to college community. This is first time Miller Library officially publicizes our digital collection at academic library community.

Metadata In DSpace

DSpace uses Dublin Core metadata schema, which includes 15 elements and some qualifiers to adapt to the library implementation profile. DSpace supports OAI (Open Archives Initiative’s Protocol) to provide metadata harvesting as a data provider, which is crucial for Open Archive Initiative.

Dspace could export metadata in DCXML file, now the team is working on migrating the export capability to use the METS standard, which will facilitate to exchange digital library objects between repositories. Basically, DSpace could be customized to allow interoperation with other library or document systems for auto-depositing in DSpace. With this capability, I try to establish the export capability for transferring metadata between dspace and our ILS, then our library users only need one search on library catalog to locate the information in our digital collection, which will definitely improve the search effectiveness and efficiency.

Building A Digital Repository, Part IV Publicizing Digital Collection

Good product needs to be promoted in an effective way, especially the collection created by the library. We decide to publicize the digital collection on campus wide and beyond campus. Firstly, we try to join consortium user group meetings to exchange the experience from what I have done. On the other side, I have to convince faculty that this is convenient, accurate and easy-access resource, and students will initially taste what it looks like when they have scholarly publications on DSpace.

I know we will have a long way to go, but we are going to employ campus newspaper ELM, presentations and library instruction to publicize the digital collection. In mean time, I will make the digital collection available on our ILS, so users will eventually use it no matter where they will access the collection

Building A Digital Repository, Part IV Publicizing Digital Collection

Good product needs to be promoted in an effective way, especially the collection created by the library. We publicize the digital collection on campus wide and beyond the campus. Firstly, we try to join consortium user group meeting to exchange the experience from what we have done. On the other side, I have to convince faculty that this is convenient, accurate and easy-access resource, students will initially taste their
Once we have digital collection on DSpace, we start to promote it. We use campus newspaper ELM, presentations and library instruction to publicize DSpace. We want to faculty and students could actively communicate on DSpace, and facilitate faculty to employ DSpace to manage their scholar research