Metadata Support Priorities

The priorities below are based on the October 2011 community survey on improving metadata support (to view survey results, click here) developed by the DSpace Community Advisory Team at the request of the DSpace Committers/Developers. Based on the survy, DCAT has summarized and interpreted the survey results and listed the community priorities below based the estimated level of effort required. Any DSpace community members should feel free to add more detailed explanation/examples to further flesh out the changes/requirements they would like to see. Community project teams can be formed around any of the priorities. If you would like to participate or lead any of the project teams, please contact Valorie Hollister at vhollister@duraspace.org.

1) Updating the Qualified Dublin Core registry in DSpace to the latest standards of the DCMI

LEVEL OF COMMUNITY EFFORT: likely low to medium
LEVEL OF DEVELOPER EFFORT: likely low to medium

need consensus/guidance from metadata experts in the community on what specifically needs to be fixed, which version of the DCMI standard should be used
need to link to the relevant schema on DC website and lock down (allow adds, but not changes)
isolate where local customizations are done

2) Standardizing the default namespaces

LEVEL OF COMMUNITY EFFORT: likely low to medium
LEVEL OF DEVELOPER EFFORT: likely low to medium

?Citation metadata?: perhaps use a subset of PRISM for citation metadata include it as a new namespace

3) Adding metadata authority controls/vocabularies to the data model

LEVEL OF COMMUNITY EFFORT: likely medium to high
LEVEL OF DEVELOPER EFFORT: likely medium to high

authority controls exist already, need to identify what specifically the community is lacking
need education/tutorials for the community about the current add-on
not allowed to ship DSpace w/Library of Congress headings
need to identify what the community thinks will work better in order to determine how big the problem is
update challenge: need to open up rights to use a controlled vocal and link from an external source so it doesn't have to be brought into DSpace
example: Nat'l Agricultural Library - linked open data, LC, subject based, NLM

4) Moving metadata related configurations from dspace.cfg to the database

LEVEL OF COMMUNITY EFFORT: likely medium to high
LEVEL OF DEVELOPER EFFORT: likely medium to high

5) Develop support for additional metadata standards (use the "Other" field to specify which standards)

LEVEL OF COMMUNITY EFFORT: likely medium to high
LEVEL OF DEVELOPER EFFORT: likely medium to high

depends on what schema (XML based schemas are more complex - dspace doesn't support XML - MODS,
MODS implemenation better done after fedora intergration since it is XML
need metadata expert
Hierarchal metadata:
- add functionality / move towards relational aspect functionality - like MODS
- allow relationships between community/collection/bitstream metadata
- possible iterative solution - create functionality that emulates hierarchal behavior
- example: adding in author affiliation
- example: metadata on bitstream - related back to items
?Citation metadata?: perhaps use a subset of PRISM for citation metadata include it as a new namespace

6) Improved (or more transparent) flexibility:

LEVEL OF COMMUNITY EFFORT: likely high
LEVEL OF DEVELOPER EFFORT: likely high

simplify/make local customizations more accessible through UI:
- simplify where/how things are done - bring more functionality to the UI or the metadata registry
- create more educational/tutorials on how/where to do things (i.e. how to plug in metadata schemas)
- import/export to metadata other than DC (like in Eprints where you pick a format for export)
expose RDF triples

7) Enhancing the metadata available for Communities, Collections and Files (bitstreams)