Discussing Metadata on Corfu
Just back from giving part of a workshop on Harvesting Metadata: Practices and Challenges at a conference in Corfu.
The conference ECDL (Europeana Conference on Digital Libraries) was the 13th of the series. More detail on the conference can be found on the website. For the workshop itself (details here) split into two parts:
- Progress and experience on Europeana and EuropeanaLocal;
- Case studies on aggregation.
I gave my talk in the first part on: Results and implications of the EuropeanaLocal metadata and content survey. This concentrated on the findings of the survey undertaken during the EuropeanaLocal survey earlier in the year. Here are the conclusions for the three areas I concentrated on.
Content
- Providers – c50% local libraries;
- Content source – c60% from archives and aggregators;
- Major themes – Local history & Fine art (typical), Education (untypical);
- Time periods: Most content 18th century to present (survival), significant content (especially museums) BCE;
- Language – Reflect the historical environment of creation: religious and legal (Latin), recent lingua francas (English, French and German); significant language communities (e.g. Swedish in Finland, Welsh in the UK).
Technical standards
- Organisations are using the expected technical standards (e.g. TIFFs and JPGs);
- Recommended use of a good set of guidelines (e.g. those from Minerva).
Metadata standards
- Libraries, archives and museums tend to use their own standards;
- Dublin Core is a popular metadata scheme;
- In-house developed metadata scheme use and no standard in use is significant
- Standard adaption significant (especially Dublin Core)
Most of these conclusions are not surprising. The major issue that arises is the implications for interoperability from the diverse metadata picture with its in-house systems and adaption of standards.
