Best Practices and Supporting Use Cases for Metadata 2020 Principles In May 2019, we issued a call for comments on a draft set of high-level, aspirational principles designed to “advocate for all of us to be good metadata citizens.” Thanks very much to the project group and the community for input on this resource. Here we present the finalized version based on this input, and include practices and use cases to support the goals of the principles.
Metadata 2020’s activism work is based on the Big Ideas that can be enabled and enhanced by richer metadata - ideas like solving poverty, and eliminating hunger. We have developed a set of Metadata Principles that are helpful in quantifying and evaluating contributions that metadata is making toward these Big Ideas. These Principles quantify what it means to have richer metadata, metadata that is Compatible (provide a guide to content for machines and people), Complete (reflect the content, components, and relationships as published), Credible (enable content discoverability and longevity), and Curated (reflect updates and new elements).
Helping Researchers Understand Metadata The M2020 Researcher Communications Project The Metadata 2020 Researcher Communications project was set up with the goal of “Exploring ways to align efforts between communities that aim to increase the impact and consistency of communication with researchers about metadata.” More to the point, we have sought to answer this question: How can Metadata 2020 help researchers make better links between their published work and scholarly communications metadata?
Today we continue to share outputs from the Metadata 2020 projects. We are excited to announce the publication of a peer-reviewed academic literature review which has been published in RIO Journal. The review presents insights gained from comparing a range of articles that address the challenges and opportunities present in scholarly communications metadata. Gregg WJ, Erdmann C, Paglione LAD, Schneider J, Dean C (2019) A literature review of scholarly communications metadata.
The stage is set. Items are ready to be described by metadata, or have some metadata to be augmented or used. But who are the cast of players that interact with metadata to ensure its usefulness? Our project, Incentives for Improving Metadata Quality, led by Fiona Counsell, has been focused on highlighting the applications and value of metadata for all parts of the community. In order to tell these stories, the project team considered the key metadata players and how to best describe them.
Today we continue our communication of Metadata 2020 outputs as outlined in an earlier post. Since 2018, our work has been primarily divided into six project groups; as co-chairs of the Researcher Communications project, we are happy to share an update on our work. This project group is been charged with increasing our understanding of the attitudes and values that individuals have about metadata in scholarly outputs in order to help inform how we talk about metadata to this audience.
Many of you are probably aware that Metadata 2020 has a project group working on Best Practices and Principles. After many months of collaboration, we are happy to share a draft of the Principles for community input. These aspirational Metadata 2020 Principles were designed to encompass the needs of our entire community while ensuring thoughtful, purposeful, and reusable metadata resources. They advocate for all of us to be good metadata citizens.
2018 was quite a year: Metadata 2020 was on the agenda at 17 conferences, workshops and meetings; community groups formed into six cross-stakeholder projects; the projects got to work to better understand metadata challenges; and we held two end-of-year-one in-person workshops with 50 people in New York and London to share things out and discuss the 2019 agenda. Over 200 people participated in some way, whether through signing up for the mailing list, chatting on Slack, or attending online meetings and webinars.
no·men·cla·ture The devising or choosing of names for things, the body or system of names in a field. For me, it started with earthquake prediction – trying to find signals – real signals. I needed consistent long-term datasets. I needed to find changes and then figure out if they were real… Turned out that most signals were changes in how things were measured… I needed good documentation. Then came the web… Suddenly more data than we could imagine.
Writing a blog post ‘about metadata’ is like calling a paramecium ‘a hungry slipper with fringe’ - you’re bound to miss out on a lot of detail. Metadata is the thing I got my library degree for, mostly because I think metadata is fascinating, but also because I loathed the reference desk and wanted regular hours. However, as my career went on (and on), I found the issues around metadata to be increasing as the supposed ease of discovery through electronic means became more universal.
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