Jane Greenberg

Assistant Professor
School of Information and Library Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

“MODELING METADATA GENERATION AT A NATIONAL SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH INSTITUTE"

Thursday, April 1, 2004
11:00 a.m. – 12:00 noon
Room 405, IS Building

Abstract: Digital resource repositories for scientific and governmental organizations are growing rapidly, particularly as researchers turn to the World Wide Web as a primary means for recording, preserving, and disseminating information. Commercial search engines using statistical algorithms facilitate resource discovery, often providing satisfactory results. However, as institutional Web sites continue to grow, retrieval effectiveness and search engine scalability can decline. Metadata has been identified as an important means for enhancing resource discovery. Despite this recognition, implementation of metadata solutions has been slow due to a number of factors, including uncertainty about who should create metadata and which generation processes to apply. This presentation shares research addressing these issues, conducted as part of the Metadata Generation Research (MGR) project (http://ils.unc.edu/~janeg/mgr).

The MGR project is based at the School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, conducted in collaboration with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), a research institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The MGR project focuses on metadata creation processes, capabilities of resource authors and metadata professionals, collaborative approaches for generating metadata, and automatic metadata generation techniques. A model is under development for facilitating the most efficient and effective means of metadata production by integrating human and automatic processes. The presentation will include an overview of the MGR project, including the underlying research motivation, research methods, and key findings to date. A preliminary metadata generation model will be discussed, along with future directions and implications of this ongoing research.