Metadata Quality Evaluation: Experience from the Open Language Archives Community

We describe the motivation, design and implementation of an infrastructure to support metadata quality assessment within a specialised Open Archives Initiative (OAI) sub-domain, the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC). While services for structural validation of metadata are widely used, there is little corresponding work regarding services which evaluate the semantic and syntactic content of metadata from a qualitative perspective. We posit that any measure of metadata quality benefits from both contextual and referential assessment – metadata on a per record and per collection basis is legitimately assessed against the baseline of broader community practice, as well as for compliance to any external standard. In this paper we describe the implementation of a metadata quality assessment scheme, and the corresponding interfaces to the evaluation tool.

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