8 Resources for Preparing Metadata
8.1 What are Metdatadata?
E. Bruna Video for LAS6292: Why Metadata?
ICPSR: What is a Codebook?
8.2 Best practices for preparing metadata
“Best Practices in Creating Social Science Metadata.” p.32 in the ICPSR Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving: Best Practice Throughout the Data Life Cycle (6th Edition).
Michener, W.K., et al . 1997. Non-geospatial metadata for the ecological sciences. Ecological Applications 7: 330–342.
[read online]Pp 446-450 in Bernard, H.R. and Bernard, H.R., 2013. Social research methods: Qualitative and quantitative approaches. Sage.
DataONE Community Engagement & Outreach Working Group (2017) “Metadata Management”. Accessed through the Data Management Skillbuilding Hub at https://dataoneorg.github.io/Education/lessons/07_metadata/index on Aug 31, 2020
8.3 Discipline-specific metadata standards
It is worth looking in these catalogs to see if you can find metadata standards for your discipline. They will provide suggestions on not only what to include, but the standard vocabulary for your discipline.
UK Digital Curation Center Directory of metadata standards for different disciplines
Ecological data: Ecological Metadata Language
Museum Specimens: Darwin Core
Geography Markup Language (GML): Emphasis on geographic features (roads, highways, bridges)
Humanities: UF Digital Collections (UFDC) key metadata fields used for non-published items such as posters, archival materials, artists’ files, field notebooks, etc. Includes a link to a template you can download. See also Template No.1 from UF’s Samuel Proctor Oral History Project, Template #2, which is a more general one from the UF Humanities Archives, and the metadata required by the Qualitative Data Repository.
8.4 Metadata templates
I have created metadata templates based on information from ICSPR (for social sciences) and Michener et al. 1997 (for biophysical sciences) that can be downloaded and edited; you can add more fields or delete any that are not relevant. Note that Table 1 in Michener et al. is much more comprehensive and provides additional guidance on how to make sure the metadata are useful. The templates are available in .txt, .Rmd, and .qmd format).
Metadata Template for Social Sciences based on ICSPR standards: .txt format or .Rmd format.
Metadata template for Biophysical Sciences based on Table 1 from Michener et al. 1997: .txt format or .Rmd format
Metadata for the Humanities or those working primarily with Qualitative Data: The metadata required often depend on the type of material with which you work (e.g., oral history, photos, digital, printed). If your data is in this domain, you can use this general template from the UF Humanities Archives: Template #2. You can also review the metadata required by the Qualitative Data Repository.
8.5 Tools for creating machine-readable metadata
I include these here in case you want to try using them. It’s not required, but it could definitely make your life easier if there is a standard tool for your discipline (e.g., MORPHO if you are working with ecological data).
Morpho: desktop application that allows researchers to create metadata and then (if they wish) upload to KNB. No longer maintained but open source and can be very useful.
giant list from the RDA of tools for creating standardized metadata for different disciplines
8.6 Metadata Dictionaries
8.7 Organizations developing metadata standards and schema
The Research Data Alliance (RDA)“has the goal goal of building the social and technical infrastructure to enable open sharing and re-use of data.”
DDI Alliance: “Established in 2003, the Data Documentation Initiative Alliance (DDI Alliance) is an international collaboration dedicated to establishing metadata standards and semantic products for describing social science data, data covering human activity, and other data based on observational methods.”
The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative is “an organization supporting innovation in metadata design and best practices across the metadata ecology”.