HathiTrust relies on member-contributed bibliographic metadata as a key part of HathiTrust’s management of content ingest, collection management and preservation, collection analytic capacity, and user discovery and access. It further supports the activities of the HathiTrust Research Center. Bibliographic metadata contributed by members exists within a larger community metadata context and, as the collection grows in scale, value, and impact for users, it is time to develop a contemporary strategy for managing member-contributed metadata.
The Task Force will build on earlier work and synergize ongoing work with HathiTrust metadata. In 2016 the HathiTrust Metadata Policy, Strategy, Use and Sharing Advisory Group (MUSAG) reported the results of an environmental scan of metadata related services, systems and policies related to the HathiTrust Digital Library for the purpose of understanding metadata issues and identifying gaps relating to record connectivity and policy. This report identified 12 distinct types of metadata in HathiTrust: bibliographic metadata, Copyright Review Management System rights investigation data, print holdings data, rights and source data, object quality metadata, METS data, print status/market availability data, registry of U.S. federal documents records, Collection Builder data, HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) Workset Builder metadata, HTRC Extracted Features, and other HTRC analytics-generated data. The report identified a wide range of opportunities and improvements.
The HathiTrust Policy on Metadata Sharing and Use was recently approved, providing broad guidance about sharing HathiTrust metadata, including member-contributed metadata. The ongoing work of the Metadata Sharing Policy Task Force addresses sharing policies for bibliographic metadata (among other metadata types) in more detail. The Community Metadata Strategy Task Force will need to monitor and, as needed, engage with the work of the Metadata Sharing Policy Task Force, but it has a broader charge looking at strategy for member-contributed metadata in light of the broader community metadata ecosystem.
Charge: Community Metadata Strategy Task Force (November 14, 2019)
Members
Sheila Torres Blank, Texas State University
Benjamin Bradley, University of Maryland
Barbara Cormack, HathiTrust staff, California Digital Library
Graham Dethmers, HathiTrust
MJ Han, University of Illinois, Chair
Nancy Lin, New York University
Chris Long, University of Colorado Boulder
Elizabeth Miraglia, University of California, San Diego
Andrea Payant, Utah State University
Michelle Paolillo, Cornell University
Tim Prettyman, HathiTrust staff, University of Michigan