Hollie White

A Metadata Best Practice for a Scientific Data Repository

Digital data repositories ought to support immediate operational needs and long-term project goals. This paper presents the Dryad repositorys metadata best practice balancing of these two needs. The paper reviews background work exploring the meaning of science, characterizing data, and highlighting data curation metadata challenges. The Dryad repository is introduced, and the initiatives metadata best practice and underlying rationales are described. Dryads metadata approach includes two prongs: one addressing the long-term goal to align with the Semantic Web via a metadata application profile; and another addressing the immediate need to make content available in DSpace via an extensible markup language (XML) schema. The conclusion summarizes limitations and advantages of the two prongs underlying Dryads metadata effort.

Examining Scientific Vocabulary: Mapping Controlled Vocabularies with Free Text Keywords

Scientific repositories create a new environment for studying traditional information science issues. The interaction between indexing terms provided by users and controlled vocabularies continues to be an area of debate and study. This article reports and analyzes findings from a study that mapped the relationships between free text keywords and controlled vocabulary terms used in the sciences. Based on this studys findings recommendations are made about which vocabularies may be better to use in scientific data repositories.

Considering Personal Organization: Metadata Practices of Scientists

The integration of data sets into repositories is considered a key issue for library and information scientists. This article reports findings from an ethnographically inspired exploratory study examining how scientists in the field of evolutionary biology organize their research data and the impact this organization could have on the information science community. Specific areas of research and analysis reported include metadata usage, perceptions of the importance of organization, and what types of personal organizational schemes are used in scientific environments. Results indicate that, contrary to assumptions that organization is completely individual and unique, there are trends in the way evolutionary biologists organize their research data.

HIVEing: the effect of a semantic web technology on inter-indexer consistency

– The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of the Helping Interdisciplinary Vocabulary Engineering (HIVE) system on the inter-indexer consistency of information professionals when assigning keywords to a scientific abstract. This study examined first, the inter-indexer consistency of potential HIVE users; second, the impact HIVE had on consistency; and third, challenges associated with using HIVE. , – A within-subjects quasi-experimental research design was used for this study. Data were collected using a task-scenario based questionnaire. Analysis was performed on consistency results using Hoopers and Rollings inter-indexer consistency measures. A series of t-tests was used to judge the significance between consistency measure results. , – Results suggest that HIVE improves inter-indexing consistency. Working with HIVE increased consistency rates by 22 percent (Rollings) and 25 percent (Hoopers) when selecting relevant terms from all vocabularies. A statistically significant difference exists between the assignment of free-text keywords and machine-aided keywords. Issues with homographs, disambiguation, vocabulary choice, and document structure were all identified as potential challenges. , – Research limitations for this study can be found in the small number of vocabularies used for the study. Future research will include implementing HIVE into the Dryad Repository and studying its application in a repository system. , – This paper showcases several features used in HIVE system. By using traditional consistency measures to evaluate a semantic web technology, this paper emphasizes the link between traditional indexing and next generation machine-aided indexing (MAI) tools.

Exploring evolutionary biologists' use and perceptions of semantic metadata for data curation

The wide acceptance of social networking tools in online environments is prompting scientists to engage in metadata creation in not only for organizing their own digital records, but also for contributing to data and journal repositories. Understanding the behaviors and practices of these communities can help us create more effective metadata structures within our information systems.

Digitizing and Preserving Law School Recordings: A Duke Law Case Study

Written as a case study, this article outlines Duke Law School Information Services’ video digitization, preservation, and access initiative. This article begins with a discussion of the case study environment and the cross-departmental evaluation of in-house video production and processing workflows. The in-house preservation reformatting process and new collection policies that resulted from this evaluation are presented next. This is followed by descriptions of the programmatic approach used to coordinate multiple access venues by focusing on Python scripting and Google Data APIs to deliver consistent content and metadata. The article concludes with a discussion on the concept of best practices.

Descriptive Metadata for Scientific Data Repositories: A Comparison of Information Scientist and Scientist Organizing Behaviors

The integration of scientific data sets into repository collections is a continuing challenge for research institutions. This study used a concurrent triangulation mixed-methods approach to gather basic quantitative and qualitative data about how 11 information professionals and 16 scientists organized data sets for personal and repository use. The results incorporate comments from study participants that elaborate on descriptive metadata use, data curation practices, and organization styles/preferences.

The HIVE impact: contributing to consistency via automatic indexing

Research has shown that automatic subject indexing is more efficient and consistent than manual indexing; yet many organizations continue to use manual indexing because of the unacceptable quality of automatically produced results. This poster presents the results of an exploratory experiment examining consistency stemming from a machine-aided indexing approach. The HIVE vocabulary server was used to present concepts to 31 workshop participants. The presentation of terms via an automatic sequence reduced the indexer burden and contributed to increased consistency. This poster reports initial results and provides a framework for further exploration of automatic indexing in manual workflows.

Organization as a means for informing repository design: the convergence of knowledge organization and personal information management in scientific data

Based on an international need for greater understanding of knowledge organization systems in science, this study is designed to show the differences and similarities found when comparing formalized knowledge organization systems in libraries with scientific personal organization schemes. This poster reports findings from a study that compares the knowledge organization practices of both scientists and information professionals when organizing scientific data.