Digging into Metadata: Final Report White Paper

The Digging into Metadata project team, which won funding as part of the 2nd Digging into Data Challenge, came together through a synergy of past collaborations, mutual contacts and debates about data. We had shared experience of the problems and pitfalls of bringing together large, disparate datasets with widely varying standards of metadata. Initial discussions about how legacy Intute data might be of use to the Internet Public Library, led on to wider debates about the problems of cross searching such datasets and how the metadata associated with them can be linked up or standardised to facilitate resource discovery. As we debated how issues of interoperability could be addressed, the Digging into Data Challenge gave us the impetus to turn our previous work, existing connections and discussions into a winning proposal. Our two year project aimed to closely examine the metadata associated with our chosen datasets and enhance that metadata through a variety of automatic, scalable techniques which built on previous collaborative work. Through this enhanced metadata our intention was to enable improved search capability over disparate digital libraries which had hugely varying levels and standards of subject metadata and which would previously have been difficult to search in a consistent way. Through this work we aimed to show firstly that our techniques could enhance poor or inconsistent metadata in a meaningful and consistent way and secondly that this enhanced metadata could lead to improved search functionality which would add value for end users