I attended the NISO/DCMI webinar Metadata for Managing Scientific Research Data presented by Jane Greenberg just now and thought I’d leave share some take-aways:
- If you think the bibliographic world is a mess, wait until you get an eyeful of the research data world.
- Data sets need metadata and boy, are there a ton of options. Among those mentioned: Dublin Core, MARC, DataCite, Darwin Core, Access to Biological Collections Data (ABCD), Ecological Metadata Language, Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata (FGDC), and Document Data Initiative (DDI).
- When picking and implementing a metadata schema for big data, focus on shareability and try to avoid creating silos.
For more information on the topic, see the paper Greenberg recently co-authored:
Willis, C., Greenberg, J. and White, H. (2012). “Analysis and synthesis of metadata goals for scientific data.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63: 1505–1520. doi: 10.1002/asi.22683
IU affiliates will be able to access the archived webinar in the near future.