Recording meetings? Discussed whether we will continue to record meetings and decided to do so, as the recordings can be helpful for documentation purposes
Election of vice chair: only one potential expression of interest from the Qualtrics form, so Melissa made one last call for volunteers. Melissa will follow-up about this.
Noted that we are continuing to meet 10 minutes after the hour in order to allow for a quick break for those with back-to-back meetings
Member self-introductions
Preliminary discussion of the MWG's charge
Melissa
Melissa raised the issue of the Metadata Working Group taking on an increasing amount of user interfaces work during last month’s Digital Repositories Committee meeting, and David and Carmen will be meeting to discuss the possibility of reviving the User Interfaces Task Force for ScholarWorks. Please note: Carmen Mitchell will attend our September meeting to continue this conversation.
From At present, we don’t really have a clear charge for our working group. The MWG Confluence pagecurrently includes the following: “Formed as part of the Digital Repositories Committee. Formerly the ScholarWorks Metadata Interest Group.” From We may want to consider writing a charge to help manage expectations and inform the scope of various projects.
The DRC Confluence page: “The purpose of the Digital Repositories Committee is to ensure the necessary guidelines, priorities, and administration of a sustainable, systemwide institutional repository system (ScholarWorks), digital archives system, and related digital library services. Creating a sustainable digital library infrastructure requires:
Identifying and establishing ongoing funding / revenue sources and models
Adherence to international standards and best practices
Development and management of user-needed platforms
Development and management of user-needed services
Development of policies to mitigate risk (structural, physical, legal, information, etc.)
Support of open access initiatives, via technology integration and OA policy implementation”
Recap of 2020-2021 Projects
Melissa
Fall 2020: Investigated potential solutions for streamlining copyright/rights metadata and recommended a blanket copyright statement as short-term solution (overview and recommendations), which Dave has implemented.
The following statement now appears at the bottom of every record: “Items in ScholarWorks are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.”
Fall 2020: Held a joint MWG/DAWG meeting (notes) and chairs discussed a master data modeling spreadsheet for DAMS. Sub-group included Julie, Nicole, Hema, and Lia.
Spring 2020: Proposed changing the workforms to align with the following categories, but these still need to be revised and implemented (more information)
Theses, Dissertations, and Culminating Graduate Student Projects (Master’s thesis, doctoral dissertation, or other culminating graduate student project) – Reviewed all ETD workform fields in May 2021
Other Student Works (Other graduate and undergraduate student works)
Publications (Article, book chapter, book, book review, report, white paper, proceeding)
Research Datasets (Datasets, models, software, etc.)
Open Educational Resources (Open textbook, syllabus, or other teaching materials)
Ongoing: We have made various recommendations for universal changes to metadata standards and instructional text for specific fields, but we still need to implement most of these. Below are a few examples.
Author/Creator name field: Enter the author’s name exactly as it appears on the title page of the work. If there are multiple authors, use the “Add another Author” option for each additional author. – Note: This change was driven by the desire to be more inclusive of names that do not follow the first name last name format currently reflected in the workforms.
Alternate name field: Recommended creation of this field with the following instructional text.
“If the author goes by an alternate name that they would like associated with the work, enter that name here.”
Title field: “You can use sentence case or title case capitalization. Want to try a title case converter? Note: At this time, special formatting such as italics is not possible.” – Note: Notch8 has been working on rich text formatting.
Degree level and Degree name: Drew from Dublin Core standards to recommend that Degree name be entered initialized with periods (e.g., M.A. or M.S.), but we may need to revisit this, as some campuses track this information in their controlled vocabulary list.
Genre vs. types: Decided that DCMI Type field will be used for genres, but we need to decide on next steps for this change.
We discussed the following points but will revisit this conversation next month, once we define our scope.
Updates from Dave and request for feedback on the following ScholarWorks form elements:. Dave noted that these may be good examples of questions that should go to a User Interfaces group. Please feel free to test these out on the demo site. Dave can provide credentials if you don’t already have them.
Composite author field: includes name, institution, and ORCID iD.
Discipline list
Date selection
Which of the following other ongoing points of discussion do we want to focus on?
Other ScholarWorks workform fields and instructional text
Streamlining copyright fields
Proposal for dealing with legacy department names
We briefly discussed the potential of a free text note field being a solution for this, among other things. Last year we discussed the need to separate the Abstract metadata from more descriptive notes (which is not currently a field).