2021-09-16 MWG Meeting notes

Announcements and Quick Progress Updates

All

• Melissa: Nicole has kindly agreed to serve as co-chair (thank you, Nicole)! Discuss slightly revised co-chair arrangement that we have shared with Carmen and Dave: one chair will focus on ScholarWorks (Melissa) and the other on collaborations with DAWG (Nicole), serving alternating 2-year terms.

• Dave: Big metadata fix coming soon and seeking feedback on clean-up of data in Resource Type field.

  • “Most of the resource types in our controlled vocabularies are capitalized when there is more than one word, so: ‘Masters Thesis’, ‘Conference Proceeding’, ‘Book Chapter’, etc.

    But we have a couple that are not: ‘Graduate project’ and ‘Capstone project’.

    I’d like to make them all consistent in terms of capitalization, and we can go either way, although at this point capitalizing both terms would be the simpler of the two options.”

    • Everyone agreed with capitalizing both terms.

Recap of Meeting with Carmen and Dave Regarding MWG’s Scope

Melissa, Nicole, and Dave

• We discussed the following points:

  • Carmen expressed thanks to current and former members of MWG for all the work this group has taken on, quite a bit of which has been beyond the scope of metadata.

  • The need to clarify the scope of the MWG and the DRC’s support for creating a separate group, tentatively envisioned as a Workforms Task Force. Are there other tasks/projects that seem outside of the scope of MWG?

  • The importance of moving forward with concerns that have been brought forward by practitioners (e.g., those on our Trello board) and prioritizing those this year.

  • Expectations for support of DAWG. Carmen and Dave are planning to update COLD on current capacity at December meeting. Increased planning for a CSU-wide DAMS to commence in January 2022. Nicole will be taking the lead on coordinating conversations between MWG and DAWG.

MWG Goals and Timelines for 2021-2022 (Google Slides overview)

Melissa, Nicole, and Dave

• Discussed a number of potential goals/projects

  • Launch a “Field of the Month” initiative to move forward with changes to instructional text for specific fields in the workforms and provide guidance to campuses willing to undertake corresponding clean-up of existing metadata.

    • Decided to move forward with this, and Melissa will present the idea at the October 1 Open Forum. We will start with updating the Title help text across all work forms and encouraging campuses to undertake corresponding metadata clean-up during October. Then we will recommend moving to author, advisor, and committee member fields.

  • Testing of ongoing enhancements (e.g., Composite author field, Discipline list, Date selection)

  • Other outstanding requests on Trello board

  • Collections-level metadata in ScholarWorks (e.g., need for Handle URLs)

  • Meetings and collaborative planning with DAWG

  • Other ideas?

• Further discussion of which tasks should be considered outside the scope of MWG and better suited to the Workforms Task Force

  • Testing and providing feedback on ongoing enhancements (after MWG makes recommendation)

  • Review existing metadata related to non-ETD student works, publications, and presentations and conceptualize separate workforms for each of these categories. MWG will then review workforms to ensure consistency with metadata standards and current practices.

  • Review existing work forms and propose updates to help text, order of fields, and overall functionality based on usability concerns as opposed to changes or issues related to metadata specifically

  • Solicit feedback on other usability considerations (e.g., record displays, result pages, facets, collections discoverability) and recommend changes as needed