2024

Decision Tree for Ingesting Assets and Descriptive Metadata

This initiative means to answer common questions held by stakeholders when managing UTL's digital assets: in what site should which items go? What is the designating source(s) of truth for these metadata records? In doing so, relationships between sites and assets can be better defined to allow for consistent ingest, publishing, and reuse of materials.

Major goals include reducing confusion or hesitancy from stakeholders when ingesting and publishing digital assets, reducing unnecessary duplication of assets in sites, and simplifying and identifying sites that stakeholders can consistently use for metadata reuse.

Inital DesignDraftCompleted DraftRound One FeedbackRound Two FeedbackPublication and SharingReview Implementation

Status: Draft decision trees created April-August 2024; sent to stakeholders for review in late August 2024.

Practical metadata reuse recommendations

Major goals include enhancing existing metadata reuse workflows and identifying/creating new ones to address ingest backlogs/staffing shortages.

INITIAL OutlineDraft RecommendationsCompleted DraftRound unsafe-One FeedbackTest ImplementationRound Two FeedbackPublication and Implementation

Status: Outlined April 2024, will be developed after completion of decision tree.

Addressing metadata siloed in local drives and databases

Major goals facilitating better metadata reuse across sites, including local authorities/vocabularies.

INITIAL OutlineDraft RecommendationsCompleted DraftRound unsafe-One FeedbackTest ImplementationRound Two FeedbackPublication and Implementation

Status: Outlined April 2024, will be developed after completion of decision tree.

2023-2024

Metadata Creation Processes Environmental Scan

This initiative focuses primarily on metadata creation and its movement through various hands to ingest in our digital collections sites. Currently, the Metadata Analyst’s work is coordinated through biweekly one-on-one check-ins with DAMS stakeholders and looser meetings with Global Studies and GeoData partners. Through the Metadata Steering Committee, the scan will identify current processes of creating non-MARC and MARC metadata and the ways those processes intersect, guiding decisions to streamline workflows.

Major goals include increasing the number of non-MARC metadata projects for Content Management, increasing non-MARC metadata training for various partners, developing strategies to ensure metadata creation/delivery lines up with Stewardship workflows, and visualizing how non-MARC and MARC metadata systems and workflows intersect with each other. The latter is especially pertinent as Primo is developed into an aggregation platform.

INITIAL Outlineinformational interviewsdata refinementdata analysisdata visualizationsdraft reportfeedbackfinal reportPublication and Implementation

Status: report completed March 2024, three major recommendations derived from scan April 2024. See the report and related findings here.

Subject/Authority Usage Environmental Scan

With a host of migrations currently active and planned for our digital collections sites, it is a good opportunity to assess current authority usage across metadata practice.

Major goals include creating documentation about authority practice, streamlining authority usage, and strategizing ways to map between diverse descriptive systems (ex. between archival and bibliographic subject usage.)

Critical metadata can be considered as a subset of the above topic. Similar to the NDSA’s levels of preservation, developing a set of evaluative levels of creating critical metadata can be a starting point to evaluate what current practice is across UT Libraries. (Can be used as a tool by repositories/members to identify where they are and where they’d like to move to.) This helps provide standard policy that repositories can fall back on, but not mandate prescriptive terminology that can be counterintuitive to description or post-custodial workflows.

INITIAL Outlinesurvey collectiondata refinementdata analysisdata visualizationsdraft reportfeedbackfinal reportPublication and Implementation

Status: draft report completed April 2024. Being reviewed by group and UTL administration spring 2024. See the report and related findings here.