Sunday, May 18, 2008

Interoperability and Metadata Quality

The interoperability between metadata schemas and institutional repositories is always a big concern since people want to exchange metadata between repositories. Metadata creation is expensive, in order to reuse metadata, institutional repositories start to harvest metadata from other repositories, this not only dramatically reduces the cost, but also facilitates to share knowledge globally.

However, interoperability is never easy to get, even though people have made efforts on it. I would suggest to control metadata quality. If metadata quality is guaranteed, it might take less time for our IT staff to clear up data and smoothly harvest metadata. Although there is no national standards like AACR2 to control metadata creation, metadata creators could use more controlled vocabularies by consulting FAST and database thesauri, and give enough descriptive metadata for users to search.

Controlling metadata quality offers accurate information for users to search and define the information they need. While for information professionals, this will warrant less potential errors and discrepancy, which would be a huge obstacle when we try to reuse the metadata.

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