Accuracy and Accountability: Addressing the Challenge of Metadata Accuracy in the Digital Age

Objective : To effectively manage the quality assurance of a growing and ever-changing collection of electronic resources by relying on automated and semi-automated techniques designed to draw on the effective reuse of well-tested strategies and approaches, as well as a broad and diverse set of library-wide skills and expertise.

Project Description : Centuries of refinement have gone into optimizing the delivery of print information, from hand-transcription to the printing press, and more recently from card to online catalogs. We can expect similarly drastic changes in the evolution of electronic materials management. The transition to e-resources creates new challenges that call for the same level of effective interventions, as quality and accuracy in information provision remains central to the mission of libraries. As changes in the publishing industry affect a quarter of electronic resources each year, title, affiliation, and access, to mention a few, need to be regularly updated to preserve accuracy. To address the challenge, the library engaged a diverse group of professionals to develop automated and semi-automated approaches designed to track and flag data inaccuracies and introduce accountability features, thus greatly contributing to the ongoing overall quality and integrity of the data.

Results : Currently, a team of 8 information specialists is conducting quality assurance reviews of metadata for more than 7,000 electronic resource records. One of the least traditional approaches used by the team is a semi-automated comparison between the in-house e-resource record system and the university-wide catalog. Testing has involved import/export between administrative tools and attempted matching using the eISSN as a unique identifier. Data collected thus far through a series of quality reviews indicate a need for updates in 10% of the records. This is consistent with observed changes in the publishing industry, demonstrates the need for ongoing quality assurance, and calls for distribution of labor among a greater number of librarians not traditionally involved in technical services efforts. This phase of the project additionally identifies the need for automated communication schemes between the online catalog and the digital library as this cross-checking will be vital to the overall metadata consistency.