Metadata for Digital Content at the Library of Congress

Jane Mandelbaum

Information Technology Services

Library of Congress

May 2009

What Do Users Want?• “What are users looking for at LC?”

• Digital Content Objects: Historical content, exhibits, archived website crawls, legislative documents, catalog records.

• Need to focus on “findability” and “usability” of digital content objects

Where Do We Want to Go?• Establish common metadata elements.

• Focus on consistent metadata.

• Explore tools for metadata remediation.

• Keep metadata modular and reusable.

What Will This Do For Us?

• Separate content and metadata so we can identify and use them separately

• Improve consistency of metadata for processing

• Improve LC’s federated faceted search

• Improve reusability and interfaces

Building on Existing Foundations

• LC leadership in Standards

• Metadata schemas for existing digital content

• Set of use cases

• Search and discovery vision of a new site: World Digital Library (access points and presentation options)

Use Cases

• Concrete examples of “what we could do if we have better metadata”

• Examples: • Navigation by place, date, type of item, topic• Reuse for different audiences, in different

combinations and delivery mechanisms• Metadata focused on inter-operability• Identify what content items are available, and in what

form.

Use Cases: Search and Discovery

• Search and Discovery– Better Faceted Searching

– More Content for Federated Searching

– Better and More Precise Access Points and Navigation

Use Cases: Target Specific Needs

• Targeted Improvements (examples)– Create standardized metadata for videos

for internal use and external providers– Focus on collection sets of interest to

teachers and educators – Improve access to digital content in LC

web pages

How are we doing it?

• Establish a master set of metadata elements commonly used among digital projects

• Annotate the master set list with preferred practices for metadata content

Create metadata profiles for projects, detailing which elements are used and how they are encoded

• Identify where metadata remediation is needed and attempt to improve specific access points (manual and automated techniques)

Useful References

– Information Architecture: Peter Morville et al.– www.loc.gov/standards– www.wdl.org– Future Directions in Metadata Remediation for

Metadata Aggregators: Digital Library Federation

Questions?

Jane Mandelbaum

Library of Congress

jman@loc.gov