Promoting Shareability: Metadata Activities of the DLF Aquifer Initiative

ABSTRACT

This article describes the progress of the Digital Library Federation's Aquifer Metadata Working Group and demonstrates a model for the construction, application, and testing of collaboratively developed best practices for sharing metadata in the digital library environment. We set the metadata aggregation context in which the Aquifer initiative began, describe the development of a set of implementation guidelines for shareable Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) records and their supporting documentation and tools, and discuss how this work has contributed to the understanding of what features metadata describing primary source and humanities-based resources needs in order to support scholarly use. We end with a summary of future efforts for the Aquifer initiative, and how its lessons can be applied in other metadata harvesting environments.

KEYWORDS:

• DLF Aquifer
• shareable metadata
• MODS
• OAI PMH
• metadata harvesting

The authors gratefully acknowledge The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for its support of the Aquifer American Social History Online Project.

Notes

1. http://www.diglib.org.

2. http://wiki.dlib.indiana.edu/confluence/x/4F4.

3. http://www.dlfaquifer.org.

4. http://www.openarchives.org/pmh/.

5. These OAI PMH aggregations or project reports can be found at Emory, http://www.metascholar.org/index.html; UIUC, http://oai.grainger.uiuc.edu/ and http://imlsdcc.grainger.uiuc.edu/; University of Michigan, http://www.oaister.org; and California Digital Library, http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/amwest/.

6. The authors would like to recognize that with the development of the Dublin Core abstract model there is a greater potential for expressing semantically rich records using the Dublin Core element set.

7. A list of Aquifer Metadata Working Group members may be found in the Appendix.

8. A summary of metadata formats in use by OAI PMH data providers can be found at the University of Illinois OAI-PMH Data Provider Registry, Distinct Metadata Schemas report, http://gita.grainger.uiuc.edu/registry/ListSchemas.asp.

9. http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/tgm2/ It should also be noted that in October 2007 the TGM I (subject terms) and TGM II were merged into a single vocabulary, although separate vocabulary files are still available.

10. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/techdocs/genre.html.

11. http://www.loc.gov/rr/mopic/miggen.html.

12. http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/MARC21slim2MODS.xsl.

13. The current version of the MARCXML to Aquifer MODS stylesheet can be found at http://wiki.dlib.indiana.edu/confluence/x/K4AQ.

14. http://wiki.dlib.indiana.edu/confluence/x/MYAQ.

15. http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/guidelines-static-repository.htm.

16. http://www.schematron.com.

17. http://www.contentdm.com.