Metadata quality assessment tool for open access cultural heritage institutional repositories

Abstract

Currently, the Metadata Quality in Cultural Heritage Institutional Repositories (IR) is an open issue. In fact, sometimes the value of the metadata fields contains typos, are out of standards, or are totally missing affecting the possibility of searching, discovering and obtaining the digital resource described. Goal of this work is to support institutions to assess the quality of their repository defining a Quality Profile for their metadata schema (e.g. Dublin core) and identifying the Completeness, Accuracy and Consistency as High level metrics. These metrics are translated in a number of computable Low level metrics (formulas) and measurement criteria. The quality measurement process has been implemented exploiting the Grid based AXMEDIS infrastructure to rise up the OAI-PMH harvesting and metadata processing performance. The quality profile metrics and the prototype have been tested on three Open Access Institution Repositories of Italian universities and the evaluation results are presented. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.