Metadata application profile: integrating different metadata schemes for cataloguing the digital learning materials collections
Alma Beatriz Rivera-Aguilera, Magaly Vega-López, Acalia Pozo-Marrero · International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications · 2010
This poster reports on a project which responds to the university needs for storage and preservation of teacher and student memories captured in digital learning materials. The main object of the project is to provide adequate storage, preservation and retrieval of digital learning materials at the Biblioteca Francisco Xavier Clavigero of the Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de Mexico. In order to achieve this goal, we propose to choose the appropriate metadata tags (Marzal Garcia-Quismondo, Calzada Prado y Cueva Cervero, 2006), to take advantage of full text content retrieval and to select the pertinent digital collection software management. Some of the benefits derived from the project will be exposure, sharing and preservation of digital learning materials produced by members of the university community and the use of open software to organize open content. The two barriers encountered during our research were a lack of regular practices concerning copyright issues and certain institutional policies. The most important result obtained from the project was the development of a system for storing and retrieving digital learning materials using Greenstone (Witten, 2009), with an application profile metadata based on Dublin Core (DC), Learning Object Metadata (LOM) (Canaval, Sarasa y Sacristan, 2008) and local labels for describing learning materials. It is important to point out that LOM is the metadata used for the description of educational items within the SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) standard (ADL, 2009). That is the reason for not using specific SCORM tags in the application profile described in this poster. Our experience has also allowed the identification of the following key elements to consider for developing application profiles for digital collections in general: 1. Collection characteristics, 2. Search and retrieval needs, 3. Preservation. 4. Subject and cataloguing expertise for metadata input and revision. 5. Conversion from previous systems. 6. Metadata harvesting. 7. Content collaborators digital culture. In the future, we hope to design, develop and offer the community a social network system, for the purpose of facilitating the description, social tagging and sharing of learning digital materials which will improve the current system characteristics. In the new system, content collaborators will have at their disposal a template for uploading their learning materials and metadata input, and the academic committees of the university departments will be responsible for content approval. Librarians will be in charge of revising the metadata input associated with the learning materials and of correcting typographical errors.