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Overview

This project focuses primarily on descriptive metadata creation and its movement through various hands to ingest, display, and storage (DAMS/UT Collections Portal, GeoData Portal, LADI, AILLA, etc.) Through the scan, we aim to gather information that can address some of the larger goals tasked to the steering committee, including metadata reuse/aggregation, workflow simplification, and resource sharing.

Methods

To organize this work, we chose to conduct an environmental scan to understand the full scope of our metadata processes. We reviewed UT Libraries repositories (11 total), noting what staff worked with these repositories, what their main purposes were (relating to the content used), types of metadata maintained, schemas used, sources from where metadata was created/built from, tools utilized in metadata transformation workflows, and then the current status of that repository. Several sites have been undergoing migration throughout the 2023 year, requiring notes about planned or now completed changes. These updates are added to our summary where relevant.

Information was gathered over the course of five months (May-September) in the form of semi-structured interviews with staff who were either curators of or involved in the metadata work for a particular repository. All staff were asked about the environmental scan spreadsheet we had worked on, asking for further clarification or correction about the content listed, as well as what staff worked on what part of the metadata workflows. Notes were taken and then relevant sections added to the spreadsheet.

A note about terminology: we have chosen to use the term “site” instead of repository, as the latter is used to refer specifically to collection or digital asset management systems. Our environmental scan covers these as well as sites that are not traditional CMS or DAMS. 

Sites reviewed:

Alma 

Digital Archive of the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive (AHPN)

Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA)

DAMS (including HRDI and Primeros Libros metadata)

GeoData Portal

Latin American Digital Initiatives (LADI)

Texas Archival Resources Online (TARO)

Tape archive (including Box and network shares)

Texas Scholarworks (TSW)

Texas Data Repository (TDR)

Visual Resources Center (VRC)

Findings

Recommendations