High-Quality Access for Electronic Content: A Proposal for a Metadata Quality Assessment for Digital Collections

Abstract

The third panelist will discuss the increasingly complicated tasks of describing and organizing complex informational items. As new and revised standards become a part of the task of enabling access and discovery through human and machine methods, providing quality metadata, and subsequently, assuring access, becomes more daunting. Digital repositories affiliated with universities, for example, house and make available the campus’s unique intellectual capital (c.f. Cullen & Chawner, 2011). Long-term access should be straightforward: if carefully planned and maintained, electronic content and surrogates should retrievable for the next 500 years. The reality is much messier, however. Preserving content for long-term access is best carried out through the use of accepted standards and through the use of approaches supported by the information community, yet the standards and best practices are currently in flux. The panel will begin with a discussion of the metrics for metadata quality: largely considered to be completeness, accuracy, and consistency (Park, 2009; Zeng & Qin, 2008) and will include measures being taken to ensure long-term access to high-quality curated content through libraries and cultural heritage institutions. The case for thoughtful and careful preservation of digital content ranging from raw data to published research papers will be made. Repositories as systems for providing access will then be explored, with an emphasis on community-supported endorsements such as the Data Seal of Approval (http://datasealofapproval.org/).