Anatomy of an Institutional Repository: Dissecting the Metadata Process

Abstract

In 2006 the Lamar Soutter Library at the University of Massachusetts Medical School licensed ProQuest’s Digital Commons institutional repository (IR) software and launched eScholarship@UMMS. The goals were to provide a showcase for the medical school’s research, teaching, and scholarship; promote open access to research; and make available an easy way for faculty and researchers to promote and distribute their work. To date the Library has established five distinct collections. Each collection varies in scope and in the way the Library acquires the content. This variation poses many challenges for metadata creation and maintenance. Each collection entails the establishment of record templates, metadata requirements, workflow processes, and quality control procedures. Ongoing work includes assigning medical subject headings and reviewing metadata submitted with the item. With the IR, the work of Library catalogers is more visible than ever before, especially since the metadata is searched in Google. This poster will address these content management challenges and successes from the perspective of a medium-sized academic health sciences library just getting started with digitization. The poster will include displays of records from both the administrative and end-user interfaces, metadata requirements, and usage data. Presented at the American Library Association Annual Conference, Washington, DC, on June 25, 2007.