Metadata 2020 Practices

The Metadata 2020 Practices

Metadata 2020 is a collaboration that advocates richer, connected, and reusable, open metadata for all research outputs, which will advance scholarly pursuits for the benefit of society. During 2019, we released a set of high-level, aspirational metadata principles designed to “advocate for all of us to be good metadata citizens.” These principles describe what we aspire to achieve.

These Metadata 2020 Practices describe how we achieve this state. Like the Principles, the Practices are context-sensitive and will be more goals than reality for some of us for some time to come, and that’s OK. What’s important and what we hope these combined resources support, is that the various stakeholders, described as personas, move toward a common set of goals, with support and guidance.

To support this work, we have collected metadata use cases. These use cases are real-world examples designed to illustrate and enlighten and may be from practitioners and the curious alike.

Principles, Practices & Personas

1. Connect to what already exists

• Do: Understand recommendations and context
• Do: Seek out and use existing metadata schema and practices
• Do: Use community resources and in-house expertise to contextualize requirements and maximize the opportunities they afford for discoverability

    Performed by Metadata Creators; Curators; Custodians; Consumers
    Principles supported:  COMPATIBLE       CURATED 

2. Adopt schema best practices

• Do: Include best practice elements when possible
• Do: Include definitions and document schema rationale, e.g. label fields
• Do: Provide best practice elements for repositories and schemas

    Performed by Metadata Creators; Custodians
    Principles supported:  COMPATIBLE       CREDIBLE 

3. Honor the strategic nature of metadata

• Do: Treat metadata as a strategic, primary output, like content
• Do: Consider broadly how rich metadata can benefit your organization by facilitating better discovery, and more linked data between resources

    Performed by Metadata Creators; Custodians
    Principles supported:  CREDIBLE       CURATED 

4. Prepare for evolving needs

• Do: Sample and audit regularly to resolve gaps and errors
• Do: Make bulk updates when new elements are introduced
• Do: Consider ongoing investments to improve metadata
• Do: Provide for interoperability
• Do: Think beyond traditional formats and publishing paradigms, e.g. books, data and other formats that may not be digitized yet or need special attention
• Don’t: Assume research itself will not also evolve and change how it will be conducted in future

    Performed by Metadata Creators; Curators; Custodians
    Principles supported:  COMPLETE       CURATED 

5. Facilitate discoverability

    Performed by Metadata Creators; Curators;
    Principles supported:  COMPATIBLE       CREDIBLE 

• Do: Use verified PIDs (Persistent IDentifiers, e.g. ORCIDs) for all contributors, organizations, and content
• Do: Use correct spelling and authoritative names from established vocabularies
• Do: Use complete publication dates
• DO: Continue to use interoperable data formats like UTF-8 and ISO 8601.
• Do: Include all contributors and their affiliations whenever possible
• Do: Favor electronic lookups and/or APIs to digitally obtain information directly from authoritative source systems
• Don’t: Re-key information or copy/ paste without proof-reading
• Do: Describe content in normalized, type-appropriate ways that are consistent with best practices
• Don’t: Use a unique-to-you approach. Augment community-specific approaches with PIDs and other standard metadata approaches

6. Adopt an attitude of continuous improvement

• DO: Respond to and address user requests for data correction
• Do: Follow the lead of users (including machines) and solicit feedback
• Do: Create feedback mechanisms for users to report their needs

    Performed by Metadata Creators; Curators; Custodians
    Principles supported:  CURATED 

7. Act on issues when found

• Do: Utilize feedback mechanisms, e.g. to report errors
• Don’t: Miss the opportunity to contribute to improvement

    Performed by Metadata Consumers
    Principles supported:  COMPLETE       CURATED 

• Do: Collaborate to solve problems
• Don’t: Work around problems

    Performed by Metadata Creators; Curators; Custodians; Consumers
    Principles supported:  COMPATIBLE       CURATED 

8. Take a personal role in making metadata richer

• Do: Collaborate.Take an active role to advocate (demand, collaborate for) richer metadata
• Don’t: Accept the status quo

    Performed by Metadata Consumers
    Principles supported:  CURATED