When Metadata Collides: Lessons on Combining Records from Multiple Repository Systems.

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

General Track, 24x7 Presentations

The session was recorded and is <a href="https://connectpro.helsinki.fi/p3ae5nd6q8r/">available for watching</a> (this presentation starts at 0:52:03)

Institution X likes to use Dublin Core and enjoys occasionally storing coordinates in the dc:rights field along with normal rights statements. Institution Y prefers PBCore and dabbles in storing LCSH subject strings as a type of corporation. What happens when the time comes for these two institutions to put their data in a shared environment? These are the issues the Boston Public Library has been facing building a statewide digital repository for Massachusetts made up of items from dozens of organizations that each have their own way of doing metadata. This talk is on the Digital Commonwealth initiative and our role as a DPLA hub, lessons learned while dealing with other institutions' data, and how we manage a repository system that contains actual digitized objects alongside metadata-only harvested records. In addition, a portion of this talk is on breaking the conventional library wisdom of "dumbing down" data to the lowest common denominator in a shared context. Instead, we go in the opposite direction: we make what we take in much more rich and discoverable by linking terms to controlled vocabularies, parsing subjects for geographic information, parsing potential dates from various fields into a standard format, and more.