Skill-Building Resources

Overview

In 2022 the working group gathered and reviewed various tutorials and other skill-building resources related to metadata. Included in the assessment were resources related to specific technologies and tools, as well as general metadata quality assessment methods. Each resource was reviewed by a member of the working group and assessed for its relevance to metadata work, clarity, accuracy, and depth of coverage. Resources were also categorized by experience level, need for prerequisites, and whether they were free with an open license or used open source technologies. All of the resulting recommendations here are free to access and most can involve open source technologies.

“Meta” sites

In addition to individual tutorials below, the group also reviewed several “meta” tutorial sites. These have many tutorials on technology and metadata subjects. We recommend a few specific examples in specific categories below, but they are all good places to start if you are interested in something not on this list:

• Library Carpentry
• Programming Historian
• W3C schools
• Stack Overflow (with caveat that this is not tutorial based, but a knowledge base)

Skill-Building Resources

The resources listed below fall into specific categories for easier classification:

• General Technology Skills: relate to foundational concepts used in metadata and other work. These include things like unix, regular expressions, and xml, among others. Many of these skills may be prerequisites for other resources on the list.
• Specific software or tools: these cover specific software products that are useful in metadata assessment work such as Open Refine or MarcEdit.
• Languages or libraries: includes programming or scripting languages that may be employed for assessment work. In most cases, these are not reliant on a specific software package, but can be applied in multiple contexts. Examples are python, R, and SPARQL
• Metadata quality assessment: this is the broadest category and is generally not technology-specific. These resources discuss approaches to assessment of a corpus of metadata and may not include specific methodologies or procedures.

In addition to categorization, each resource is described with the following details:

• Technologies/concepts covered
• Experience level
• Prerequisites needed
• Creator of tutorial
• Date created/updated
• A general review provided by a member of the assessment team

This resource list should not be viewed as comprehensive, but merely a snapshot of available resources at the time of review. The team hopes that the list will undergo future reviews and additions over time.

Skill-building Resource Team
Gretchen Gueguen, Center for Open Science
Kate Flynn, Chicago Collections Consortium
Amelia Mowry, Wayne State University