Resources About Provenance
* Improving Metadata Quality: Augmentation and Recombination By Diane I. Hillmann, Naomi Dushay, and Jon Phipps. Paper presented at the DC2004 Conference, October 2004, Shanghai, China. Abstract: Digital libraries have, in the main, adopted the traditional library notion of the metadata 'record' as the basic unit of management and exchange. Although this simplifies the harvest and re-exposure of metadata, it limits the ability of metadata aggregators to improve the quality of metadata and to share specifics of those improvements with others. The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) is exploring options for augmenting harvested metadata and re-exposing the augmented metadata to downstream users with detailed information on how it was created and by whom. The key to this augmentation process involves changing the basic metadata unit from 'record' to 'statement.' Available at: http://dcpapers.dublincore.org/ojs/pubs/article/view/770
* Sample XML Record This sample record was built to illustrate an approach to provenance based on OAI-PMH and its provenance package. The approach uses links to service descriptions to allow downstream users to better understand the basis for improvement of particular statements. http://managemetadata.com/jon/nsdl_aug_mudball_2004_08_05.xml
* Metadata Quality: From Evaluation to Augmentation By Diane I. Hillmann. Cataloging and Classification Quarterly, 9-Jul-2007. Abstract: The conversation about metadata quality has developed slowly in libraries, hindered by unexamined assumptions about metadata carrying over from experience in the MARC environment. In the wider world, discussions about functionality must drive discussions about how quality might be determined and ensured. Because the quality-enforcing structures present in the MARC world–mature standards, common documentation, and bibliographic utilities–are lacking in the metadata world, metadata practitioners desiring to improve the quality of metadata used in their libraries must develop and proliferate their own processes of evaluation and transformation to support essential interoperability. In this article, the author endeavors to describe how those processes might be established and sustained to support metadata quality improvement. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/7899
* The Continuum of Metadata Quality: Defining, Expressing, Exploiting By Thomas R. Bruce and Diane I. Hillmann. In “Metadata in Practice,” Chicago : ALA Editions, 2004. Abstract: Like pornography, metadata quality is difficult to define. We know it when we see it, but conveying the full bundle of assumptions and experience that allow us to identify it is a different matter. For this reason, among others, few outside the library community have written about defining metadata quality. Still less has been said about enforcing quality in ways that do not require unacceptable levels of human effort. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/7895