Metadata Standards Directory Working Group Recommendations

Metadata Standards Directory WG

Recommendation Title: Metadata standards directory Impact: Enables discovery of metadata standards for documenting research data, regardless of academic discipline, and addresses issues related to coverage, ease of maintenance and sustainability.

Recommendation package  Github: http://rd-alliance.github.io/metadata-directory/

Co-Chairs: Alex Ball, UKOLN Informatics Jane Greenberg, Metadata Research Center Keith Jeffery, Keith G Jeffery Consultants Rebecca Koskela, DataONE

The United Kingdom Digital Curation Centre (DCC) launched a Disciplinary Metadata Standards Catalogue (http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/metadata-standards) just before this Working Group started its activity. The DCC’s catalogue was adopted, enriched, and expanded by the Working Group. Furthermore the Working Group developed a functional prototype directory (http://rd-alliance.github.io/metadata-directory/), based around the GitHub infrastructure, that places the information from the DCC directory into an environment where it can be maintained transparently and with full version control. Metadata use cases were also collected from Working Group members using a standard template and ultimately included in the set of use cases compiled by the RDA Metadata Interest Group.

The Metadata Standards Directory Working Group set out to develop a directory that would enable researchers, and those who support them, to discover metadata standards that would be appropriate for documenting their research data, regardless of their academic discipline. It happened that a directory with similar aims had recently been developed independently by the UK Digital Curation Centre (DCC), so the group collaborated with the DCC on developing the directory further to achieve additional goals regarding coverage, ease of maintenance, and sustainability.

The group provided updates and additions to the entries in the DCC directory, and developed a second instance of the directory that could be maintained by the community. Additions and updates to the second instance were and are fed back to the DCC version. The second instance was designed in such a way as to simplify any future development e ort, and indeed such development is being taken forward by the Metadata Standards Catalog Working Group.

As well as developing the directory itself, the group also collected use cases that will inform the work of the Metadata Standards Catalog Working Group, the Data in Context Interest Group, and the Metadata Interest Group.