Metadata is often called “data about data.” It has been used by various communities creating geospatial data, social and scientific data sets, enterprise applications, data warehouses, educational resources, and bibliographic data. In the traditional library world, catalog records are metadata, as they contain information about the library’s collection of “data,” i.e., the books and journals that make up its collections. Increasingly, libraries have been adopting emerging metadata standards such as Dublin Core, EAD, MODS, and TEI to describe, discover, preserve, manage, and provide access to electronic resources and digital objects.
This SPEC survey investigated how metadata is implemented in ARL member libraries: which staff are creating metadata and for what kinds of digital objects, what schemas and tools they use to create and manage metadata, what skills metadata staff need and how they acquire them, and the organizational changes and challenges that metadata has brought to libraries.
This survey was distributed to the 123 ARL member libraries in February 2007; 68 libraries (55%) responded to the survey, of which 67 (99%) reported creating metadata for digital objects at their institutions. The primary factor driving the creation of metadata is the responding libraries’ involvement in digitization projects (66 of 67 responses or 99%). Metadata also plays an important role in institutional repositories (54%). Other initiatives and projects that have promoted the use of metadata are: Web content management, data sets, subject-based and educational repositories, metadata registries, digital media labs, EAD-finding aids, and online journal publishing. Metadata is being created to describe and provide access to a wide variety of digital resources, including images, text, collections, audio, maps, video, data sets, EAD finding aids, theses, and Web pages.
This SPEC Kit includes documentation from respondents in the form of mission statements, organizational charts, job descriptions, and policies.
The table of contents and executive summary from this SPEC Kit are available online at http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/spec298web.pdf.
Ordering Information
SPEC Kit 298, Metadata
Jin Ma • July 2007 • ISBN 1-59407-791-6 • 174 pp. • $45 ($35 ARL members)
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SPEC Kits Exchange Information
Designed to examine current research library practices and policies and serve as resource guides for libraries as they face ever-changing management problems, each SPEC Kit contains a summary analysis, survey questions with tallies, pertinent documentation from participating libraries, and a reading list and Web site references for further information on the topic.
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