Using collection descriptions to enhance an aggregation of harvested item-level metadata

As an increasing number of digital library projects embrace the harvesting of item-level descriptive metadata, issues of description granularity and concerns about potential loss of context when harvesting item-level metadata take on greater significance. Collection-level description can provide valuable context for item-level metadata records harvested from disparate and heterogeneous providers. This paper describes an ongoing experiment using collection-level description in concert with item-level metadata to improve quality of search and discovery across an aggregation of metadata describing resources held by a consortium of large academic research libraries. We present details of approaches implemented so far and preliminary analyses of the potential utility of these approaches. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of related issues and future work plans. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.7 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Digital Libraries – collection, systems ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: JCDL
• Authors: Muriel Foulonneau, Timothy W. Cole, Thomas G. Habing, Sarah L. Shreeves
• Keywords: Descriptive Metadata, Item-level Descriptive Metadata, Item-level Metadata, JCDL 2005