In fall 2005, the Metadata Unit was included in the Stanford Libraries’ re-organization which created the Digital Library Systems and Services department. Formerly seated in the Libraries’ Technical Services Cataloging and Metadata Services Department, the Metadata still works in conjunction with the managers and staff of Cataloging and Metadata Services as well as other Technical Services staff. The Metadata unit’s purpose is to assist SUL/AIR staff, and Stanford students, faculty, and staff in the needs assessment, creation, loading, and maintenance of metadata for SUL/AIR's digital collections.
To assist SUL/AIR staff, and Stanford students, faculty, and staff in the needs assessment, creation, loading, and maintenance of metadata for SUL/AIR's digital collections following established national and international standards, and appropriate policies and procedures developed in conjunction with other SUL/AIR departments and the SUL/AIR Digital Library Program.
Metadata Services
The Metadata Unit provides services with the following underlying strategies:
- Efficient creation and delivery of metadata involves planning the appropriate and efficient use of skilled library and software development professionals, of library support staff, and of vendor delivered services to orchestrate, generate, and maintain metadata that is managed as an ongoing, persistent component of the Stanford Digital Repository's production environment;
- As the technical support services' infrastructure for the Stanford digital library matures, the Metadata Unit is adapting the principles, skills and techniques used to analyze and control data in the production environments of the traditional, physical library to those required for digital content;
- Metadata production is done in collaboration with other Stanford Library units, and with subject or knowledge specialists who use the digital content;
- Metadata production moves at a pace responsive to the increased capacity that ingestion of multiple millions of digital objects portends;
- Scalable production and delivery of metadata for the Stanford Digital Repository uses new automated tools and procedures that take advantage of automatic capture, creation and assignment of metadata at both pre-processing and post-processing stages of data archiving;
Briefly, some of the metadata services provided by the Metadata Unit include the following:
- Assess metadata needs and provide cost estimates for digitization projects and grant applications
- Design, test, and adapt data models for ingesting and storing metadata and content into the Libraries' digital repository (usually in collaboration with digitization project managers, and software developers)
- Map descriptive and administrative metadata schemas to the Stanford Digital Repository's core metadata set
- Design workflow for metadata creation, quality assurance, conversion, enhancement, maintenance and delivery
- Assist with project coordination for the metadata services aspects of digitization and preservation projects
- Identify and provide metadata skills training
- Recommend authorized terms, subject headings, descriptors and/or taxonomies for digitization projects
- Adapt or create collection specific taxonomies and vocabularies for digitization projects
- Create and apply existing taxonomies to full text document collections
The Metadata Unit's Metadata Service Definitions provide more information about each of these services. [Forthcoming]
Scope
The Metadata Unit provides services to Stanford University faculty, students and staff who are interested in depositing scholarly, research and course-related digital content into the Stanford Digital Repository or otherwise make them available via Stanford Library supported portals.
Last modified:
March 28, 2006
