About
Welcome to the Digital Library Federation (DLF) Assessment Interest Group (AIG) Metadata Working Group, also known as the DLF Metadata Assessment Working Group.
Mission
The DLF Metadata Assessment Working Group strives to collaboratively build guidelines, best practices, tools, and workflows around the evaluation and assessment of metadata used by and for digital libraries and repositories. We fulfill this mission by supporting discussions of metadata assessment and quality control, sharing metadata assessment approaches, and fostering a community of dedicated metadata assessment professionals.
The DLF Metadata Assessment Working Group creates high-level outputs that metadata workers from all walks of life can employ for their various metadata assessment needs.
As such, our efforts focus on how to measure, evaluate, and assess metadata as it exists in various digital library systems.
We hope that this resource offers a way for fellow metadata professionals to perform their own assessment of metadata practices; understand the results; and–ultimately–decide on a path that both enhances metadata quality and leads to a better understanding of one’s collections.
Current efforts
The 2023 DLF Metadata Assessment Working Group’s efforts focused on:
- Publicizing information about the group and about metadata quality through blog posts and social media
- Evaluating next steps for benchmarking based on survey data
- Standardizing and maintaining a metadata analysis tools repository
- Updating the DLF Metadata Assessment Working Group’s website
- Reviewing and updating a glossary of digital library terms
Prior Efforts
See the DLF Metadata Assessment Working Group’s wiki page for prior years’ goals and deliverables.
Project Limitations
This resource provides metadata professionals with a plain language, high-level resource for assessing descriptive metadata in digital collections.
Due to the wide range of digital collections, users, and institutions, this tool does not offer prescriptive recommendations for metadata.
As a member of the DLF community, we abide by the DLF Code of Conduct.