Sixteenth International Conference on Technology, Knowledge & Society

Abstract

This paper examines the inextricable relationship between back-end metadata management and remediation, front-end search and discovery user interfaces, and access and usability. The Illinois Digital Heritage Hub is a state-wide metadata aggregation project that gathers and provides metadata records to the Digital Public Library of America. The project has widened access to local Illinois-based collections from dozens of institutions, making digital primary source materials in Illinois available to US-wide and global user groups. The project has been successful in onboarding institutions and in educating contributors’ staff on the minimum metadata requirements for providing records to the IDHH and DPLA. However, recommended metadata standards have been difficult to address, which have turned out to be crucial in search and discovery. This paper will focus on subject metadata in the IDHH and DPLA, why local institutions are not often applying recommendations and the effects of this unremediated metadata on search and discovery. The paper will then explore possible remediation solutions, such as working more closely with contributing institutions and automatic enhancements that can be performed to remediate subject metadata. The importance of incentivizing the often tedious, if not grueling work of remediating metadata will be discussed; local contributing institutions like to know the ends toward which they are working and demonstrating and articulating “ideal” metadata and its user empowerment may be more effective than more typical approaches like sharing project documentation and expecting institutions to adhere to standards without clearly explaining and demonstrating the purpose of these standards.