Metadata Quality: From Evaluation to Augmentation

The conversation about metadata quality has developed slowly in libraries, hindered by unexamined assumptions about metadata carrying over from experience in the MARC environment. In the wider world, discussions about functionality must drive discussions about how quality might be determined and ensured. Because the quality- enforcing structures present in the MARC world–mature standards, common documentation, and bibliographic utilities–are lacking in the metadata world, metadata practitioners desiring to improve the quality of metadata used in their libraries must develop and proliferate their own processes of evaluation and transformation to support essential interoperability. In this article, the author endeavors to describe how those processes might be established and sustained to support metadata quality improvement.