We all face the same problem—how to include as much useful information as possible. This includes basic information but also license information, funding/grant data, ORCID iDs, organization IDs, clinical trial data, and—along the way—corrections and retractions. How can we manage the efficient entry and use of clean and complete metadata, in a way that can grow and permeate through other systems usable by all in the scholarly communications chain?
We envision a future with better metadata, not only increasing discoverability of content, but also benefiting reputation management, attribution, discoverability, efficiency, data reproducibility and reusability, in addition to future services that don’t yet exist!
A group of organizations (including Crossref, DataCite, ORCID, OpenAIRE, California Digital Library, Wikimedia, OCLC among others) have come together to rally the community around this critical issue in scholarly communications: sharing richer metadata.
Metadata 2020 is a collaboration that advocates richer, connected and reusable metadata for all research outputs with the understanding that:
- Richer metadata fuels discoverability and innovation;
- Connected metadata bridges the gaps between systems and communities;
- Reusable metadata eliminates duplication of effort.
At this workshop, lead by Patricia Feeney and Chuck Koscher from Crossref, and Juliane Schneider from Harvard Catalyst (and Data Curator for eagle-i) sought input from librarians, to share user stories and insights about the journey that metadata takes, and to help prioritize goals and tactics for Metadata 2020. Metadata 2020 is a campaign that is bigger than just one organization or sector, but a collective responsibility shared by us all.
This workshop invited contributions from specialists in the librarian community to help advance the library element of a metadata maturity model. This element will contribute to a larger maturity model in service of the wider scholarly communications community. The discussion ranged the kinds of activities surrounding metadata, and what ad hoc versus optimal, or ‘best practice’ versions of these activities would look like. Questions were raised about the ability of a single metadata maturity model to cover all metadata that librarians handle, especially the range of disciplinary metadata that is now used in scholarly communications and research data description. At the end of the session, the output (lists of activities, questions, and definitions of what metadata is) will be shared with the core Library Community group and added to further discussions as the Metadata 2020 collaboration moves forward.