Introducing the British Library’s Collection Metadata Strategy in the context of its unpublished collections

1. Introducing the British Library’s
Collection Metadata Strategy in the
context of its unpublished
collections
UKAD Forum 2016: ‘Data Matters!’:
Bill Stockting, British Library

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Collection Management and Metadata
• As part of structural change
relating to ever increasing
acquisition of digital
materials, a Collection
Management department set
up
• Responsible for
management of all collection
items throughout the ‘life
cycle’
• Collection Metadata section
now responsible for all types
of metadata: technical,
administrative, preservation
and rights as well as
descriptive metadata
Acquisition
/
Receipt
Ingest/
Metadata
capture
Preservation/
Conservation
Access

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Collection Metadata Strategy
Collection Metadata Strategy
development led by Neil Wilson:
•Collection Metadata an
extremely valuable asset for the
Library without which it can’t meet
its purposes
•Reflecting its development over
time our metadata is unfit to meet
the challenges of providing digital
services online
•So much work is needed to
‘unlock’ the value in our metadata
so that it is ‘comprehensive,
coherent, authoritative and
sustainable’

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Collection Metadata Strategy Objectives
1. Drive efficiencies in the creation, management and
exploitation of collection metadata to support
delivery of the Library’s strategic priorities and
programmes
2. Improve the Library’s return on investment in its
collection metadata assets by ensuring their long
term value is maintained for future activities
3. Open up more of the Library’s collection metadata
to improve access to Library content and promote
wider re-use

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Metadata for Archives and Manuscripts
• Much invested in the
development of IAMS but to get
maximum return we need to
allow open re-use of the
information
• This possible as during
development we thought about
information not just as
‘catalogues’ but as data with
many uses so:
– Standards based
– Persistent identification
– License as CC0
• So ‘open data’ rather than a
‘closed catalogue’

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Open Metadata for Portals:

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SNAC: Radial Graph View

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Open Metadata for Researchers
Now developing an OAI-PMH
repository to share data at scale
Also looking at other formats to
share metadata with researchers
and projects of all sorts:
•LOD similar to Library’s BNB
release
•Basic RDF/XML files
•Less complex ‘researcher format’
files (.csv) that open in Excel, which
include these that merge archival
and bibliographic data:
– Alice in Wonderland
– Magna Carta

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Any Questions?