Via the Stu Weibel on the Dc-General list,

-----Original Message-----


From:  Karen Smith-Yoshimura

Dear colleagues,

I am pleased to announce that the results of the RLG Programs
Descriptive Metadata Practices Survey are now available.

We conducted this survey in July and August 2007 among 18 RLG partners
in the United States and the United Kingdom, selected because they had
"multiple metadata creation centers" on campus that included libraries,
archives, and museums and had some interaction among them. Our objective
was to gain a baseline understanding of current descriptive metadata
practices and dependencies, the first project in our program to change
metadata creation processes.

The report summarizes the descriptive practices used across a variety of
applications, the data structure and data content standards followed,
the audiences for the metadata created, and some organization patterns.
The data from the 89 respondents is reported in a series of charts and
graphs that are open to interpretation. RLG Programs offers its own
interpretation in the prefatory narrative, flagging questions for follow
up and goals for future projects. Although we saw some expected
variations in practice across libraries, archives and museums, we were
struck by the high levels of customization and local tool development,
the limited extent to which tools and practices are, or can be, shared
(both within and across institutions), the lack of confidence
institutions have in the effectiveness of their tools, and the
disconnect between their interest in creating metadata to serve their
primary audiences and the inability to serve that audience within the
most commonly used discovery systems (such as Google, Yahoo, etc.).

The survey report is divided into two documents: 

RLG Programs' interpretation of the results and the issues we identified
to pursue in future projects. (13 pages)  The narrative is available at:

http://www.oclc.org/programs/publications/reports/2007-03.pdf (99K) 


The data supplement with the charts and graphs generated from the 89
survey responses the survey instrument. (46 pages)  The supplement is
available at:

http://www.oclc.org/programs/publications/reports/2007-04.pdf (258K) 


We are grateful to all who participated in the survey! 

Karen Smith-Yoshimura
RLG Programs, OCLC Programs and Research 
777 Mariners Island Blvd. Suite #550
San Mateo, CA USA 94404
1-650-287-2141
[log in to unmask]  
Karen blogs at http://www.hangingtogether.org/