Abstract
Abstract The Metadata 2020 initiative is an ongoing effort to bring various scholarly communications stakeholder groups together to promote principles and standards of practice to improve the quality of metadata. To understand the perspectives and practices regarding metadata of the main stakeholder groups (librarians, publishers, researchers, and repository managers), we conducted a survey during summer 2019. The survey content was generated by representatives from the stakeholder groups. A link to an online survey (17 or 18 questions depending on the group) was distributed through multiple social media, listserv, and blog outlets. Responses were anonymous, with an optional entry for names and email addresses for those who were willing to be contacted later. Complete responses (N = 211; 87 librarians, 27 publishers, 48 repository managers, and 49 researchers) representing 23 countries on four continents were analyzed and summarized for thematic content and ranking of awareness and practices. Across the stakeholder groups, the level of awareness and usage of metadata methods and practices was highly variable. Clear gaps across the groups point to the need for consolidation of schema and practices, as well as broad educational efforts to increase knowledge and implementation of metadata in scholarly communications.
Highlights
Classifying and/or descriptive information about knowledge resources has been in existence as long as libraries have
Questionnaire content by stakeholder groups was drafted by the first author, first for researchers, and circulated to other project teams in the Metadata 2020 community to customize the questions for the other stakeholder groups
More specialized selection lists or modifications to questions were done by Metadata 2020 team members who identified with that stakeholder group and posted for review and comment
Summary
Classifying and/or descriptive information about knowledge resources (what we call metadata) has been in existence as long as libraries have. With the advent of computers, Stuart McIntosh and David Griffel (1967) created a similar cataloging resource in the 1960s to that of the Pinakes. It was called ADMINS and listed of the library contents from several points of view (by author, by subject, etc.). They instead codified this information by attaching a set of “meta data” to the resources themselves, and using a computer system to produce a list of resources from the desired point of view.
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