Oksana L. Zavalina

Collection Definition in Federated Digital Resource Development

As part of a federation project providing integrated access to over 170 digital collections, we are studying how collections can best be represented to meet the needs of service providers and diverse user communities. This paper reports on recent results from that project on how digital resource developers conceive of and define their collections. Based on content analysis of collection registry records, survey and interview data, and focus groups, we identify collection definition trends including a broadening of target audiences, elaboration of subject representation, and a lack of clearly defined selection criteria. Our findings reveal high variability and ambiguity in the collection construct. We discuss how the concept of collection is being continuously defined through the processes of digital resource development and federation and how rapidly changing conceptualizations are likely to impact adoption, tailoring, and development of digital collections and their use.

Beyond size and search: building contextual mass in digital aggregations for scholarly use

At present there are no established collection development methods for building large-scale digital aggregations. However, to realize the potential of the collective base of digital content and advance scholarship, aggregations must do more than provide search of sizable bodies of content. Informed by empirical understanding of scholarly information practices, the IMLS Digital Collections and Content project developed an aggregation strategy for building Opening History, one of the largest digital cultural heritage aggregations in the country. The strategy applied policy-driven collecting, based on the principle of contextual mass, and conspectus-style evaluation of collection-level metadata to identify strong subject areas within the aggregation. Analysis of density, interconnectedness, diversity, and small/large collection complementarity determined subject concentrations and thematic strengths to be prioritized for future collection development and used as organizational structures for browsing and visualization. The approach models how scholars build their own personal research collections, as they follow leads from collection to collection across institutions near and far, and adds value that cannot be achieved through conventional retrieval and browsing at the item-level.

Trends in metadata practices: a longitudinal study of collection federation

With the increasing focus on interoperability for distributed digital content, resource developers need to take into consideration how they will contribute to large federated collections, potentially at the national and international level. At the same time, their primary objectives are usually to meet the needs of their own institutions and user communities. This tension between local practices and needs and the more global potential of digital collections has been an object of study for the IMLS Digital Collections and Content (IMLS DCC) project. Our practical aim has been to provide integrated access to over 160 IMLS-funded digital collections through a centralized collection registry and metadata repository. During the course of development, the research team has investigated how collections and items can best be represented to meet the needs of local resource developers and aggregators of distributed content, as well as the diverse user communities they may serve. This paper presents results from a longitudinal analysis of IMLS DCC development trends between 2003 and 2006. Changes in metadata applications have not been pronounced. However, multi-scheme use has become less common, and use of Dublin Core remains high, even as recognition of its limitations grows. Locally developed schemes are used as much as MARC, and may be on the increase as new collections are incorporating less traditional library and museum materials, and more interactive and multimedia content. Based on our empirical understanding of metadata use in practice, patterns in new content development, and user community indicators, our research has turned toward identifying metadata relationships between items and collections to preserve context and enhance functionality and usefulness for scholarly user communities.

Evaluating Descriptive Richness in Collection-Level Metadata

ABSTRACT When many collections are 1 brought together in a federation or aggregation, the attributes of the original collections can become difficult to discern. Collection-level 2 metadata has the potential to provide important context about the purpose and features of individual collections, but the qualitative aspects of collections are difficult to describe in a systematic way. This article reports on a content analysis of collection records in the Digital Collections and Content (DCC) aggregation, conducted to analyze the kinds of substantive and purposeful information represented across 202 cultural heritage collections. We found that the free-text Description field often provides more accurate and complete representation of subjects and object types than the specified fields; it consistently represents properties such as uniqueness, importance, comprehensiveness, provenance, and creator of items in digital collection, and other vital contextual information about the intentions of collectors and the value of collections for scholarly users. The results show that free-text collection metadata can be both concise and semantically rich, and can provide a valuable source of data for enhancing and customizing controlled vocabularies.

Subject Access: Conceptual Models, Functional Requirements, and Empirical Data

One of the central functions of bibliographic control is providing subject access. However, numerous studies conducted over decades have shown that users routinely experience problems with subject access in library catalogs and databases. These problems are often due to inadequate quality of subject metadata, which is greatly influenced by complexity of subject representation. The fact that major cataloging standards (e.g., AACR2 and its predecessors) have been overlooking the importance of subject access and have not addressed subject cataloging is arguably one of the reasons behind problems in organization of subject access. The new cataloging code—Resource Description and Access (RDA)—attempts to fill this gap. Upon examination of how subject access is addressed in RDA and its underlying conceptual models that specify functional requirements for bibliographic control—FRBR, FRAD, and FRSAD—this article presents results of a study that used FRBR model as an analytical framework in examination of user search queries in a large-scale digital library. The findings of this study provide empirical data to inform the development of RDA sections that cover subject access, particularly subject entities and relationships.

Contextual Metadata in Digital Aggregations: Application of Collection-Level Subject Metadata and its Role in User Interactions and Information Retrieval

A number of digital libraries that aggregate multiple digital collections are now generating subject metadata to describe intellectual content of entire digital collections as integrated wholes and to provide context for individual digital objects within them. However, the utility of this important contextual metadata has not been empirically evaluated. The exploratory study reported in this article examined and compared collection-level subject metadata in three large-scale aggregations of cultural heritage digital collections in the United States and the European Union and analyzed the role of collection-level metadata in information retrieval in digital aggregations based on user search queries derived from transaction logs. A small-scale targeted user study, which combined interviews and observations of users interacting with an aggregation, was undertaken to complement evidence-based content analysis data. The study revealed considerable variability in two indicators: consistency of applying controlled-vocabulary collection-level subject metadata elements beyond topical and value length of metadata elements. Both free-text and controlled-vocabulary subject metadata were found vital in answering search queries of aggregation users. Users also expressed preference for viewing complete structured collection-level metadata records, which include subject metadata. Results of this study prove importance of provision of collection-level metadata in general and subject metadata in particular to enhance user experiences and information retrieval in digital libraries.

Collection‐level user searches in federated digital resource environment

As part of a federation project providing integrated access to over 160 digital collections, we are studying how collections can best be represented to meet the needs of diverse user communities. This paper reports preliminary transaction log analysis results from that project on subject representation of the digital collections. The findings reveal prevalence of the broadly defined subject search at the collection level, and the lack of semantic similarity between the user queries and the GEM controlled vocabulary terms used for collection description. Based on the actual search data, it is recommended that the 2nd group of entities in the FRBR model be updated to cover ethnic/national groups and classes of persons. The paper proposes definitions of the two major collection-level search types - known-item and subject - and formulates research questions for further investigation into subject access to federated collections.

Building a Framework of Metadata Change to Support Knowledge Management

Evolving user needs and relevance require continuous change and reform. A good digital collection has mechanisms to accommodate the differing uses being made of the digital library system. In a metadata management context, change could mean to transform, substitute, or make the content of a metadata record different from what it is or from what it would be if left alone. In light of the evolving compliance requirements, this paper analyses the three most common types of change within metadata records as well as their subcategories and discusses the possible implications of such changes within and beyond the metadata records.

Complementarity in Subject Metadata in Large-Scale Digital Libraries: A Comparative Analysis

Provision of high-quality subject metadata is crucial for organizing adequate subject access to rich content aggregated by digital libraries. A number of large-scale digital libraries worldwide are now generating subject metadata to describe not only individual objects but entire digital collections as an integral whole. However, little research to date has been conducted to empirically evaluate the quality of this collection-level subject metadata. The study presented in this article compares free-text and controlled-vocabulary collection-level subject metadata in three large-scale cultural heritage digital libraries in the United States and the European Union. As revealed by this study, the emerging best practices for creating rich collection-level subject metadata includes describing a collections subject matter with mutually complementary data values in controlled-vocabulary and free-text subject metadata elements. Three kinds of complementarity were observed in this study: one-way complementarity, two-way complementarity, and multiple complementarity.

Metadata change in traditional library collections and digital repositories: exploratory comparative analysis

This paper reports preliminary results of a comparative study of metadata change over time in two different environments – digital repository and bibliographic utility used for cooperative cataloging – and with two different metadata schemes – a local version of Dublin Core and Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC). The findings with regards to metadata change types and subtypes observed, as well as the most frequently occurring change categories and metadata fields in which the change occurs most frequently are presented, and the implications are discussed.