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Metadata for everyone: Identifying metadata quality issues across cultures

Metadata is crucial to the dissemination and communication of research. Well-formed metadata facilitates discovery and access and provides contextual, technical, and administrative information in a standard form. Yet metadata are also sites of tension between sociocultural representations, resource constraints, and standardized systems. Formal and informal interventions in metadata spaces may be interpreted as metadata quality issues, political acts to assert identity, or strategic curatorial choices to maximize discoverability and visibility. In this context, we engaged with Crossref on the Metadata for Everyone project to understand how metadata quality, consistency, and completeness impact individuals and communities. Working from a sample of records known to have erroneous, incomplete, or otherwise imperfect metadata, this project set out to identify and classify the issues stemming from how metadata and communities press up against each other to intentionally reflect (or not) cultural meanings. Beginning with an overview of the context and our qualitative approach, this presentation will go on to provide an overview of the various metadata quality issues we identified and the typology we developed to better understand them. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings and describing future work we intend to undertake.

Speaker(s)


2:00 PM
20 minutes