Consortial Geospatial Data Collection: Toward Standards and Processes for Shared GeoBlacklight Metadata

Abstract

Consortial geospatial data communities, such as the OpenGeoPortal federation and the GeoBlacklight initiative, facilitate contextualized discovery and promote metadata sharing to disperse hosting and preservation responsibilities across institutions. However, the challenges of communal metadata are manifold; they include proliferating standards, varying levels of completeness, mutable technology infrastructures, and uneven availability of human labor. Drawing from literature on metadata quality control, we outline a procedure for "scoring" GeoBlacklight records to establish a Domain Specific Language for metadata best practices. We propose strategies for authorship and management conducive to functionally interoperable geospatial metadata, that is versioned and enhanceable by the collective.

One store has all? - the backend story of managing geospatial information toward an easy discovery

“…Academic libraries have started their efforts to adopt the geoportal technology into their own discovery tools, such as the development of the Alexandria Digital Library project (Smith and Frew, 1995) and the G-portal project developed at Singapore (Lim et al, 2002). In recent years, these efforts were boosted by the open source development concept, which allows more institutions to participate and contribute into the development of a single geoportal, such as the Open Geoportal federation and the GeoBlacklight community (Florance et al, 2015;Battista et al, 2017).…”

“…Although challenges exist when document metadata using these standards and transform metadata records between the standards and library's generic metadata formats, many studies have addressed these issues and provided best management practices or crosswalk (Nogueras-Iso, Zarazaga-soria and Muromedrano, 2005;Batcheller, 2008;Hardy and Durante, 2014). Starting from 2014, a GitHub repository, OpenGeoMetadata, emerged as an online space for libraries to share their geospatial metadata in an open, standards-agnostic way and has become an essential piece of infrastructure for building cross-institutional catalogs (Battista et al, 2017;OpenGeoMetadata, 2018). It greatly fostered the collaboration between individual libraries.…”