Analysis of metadata schemas for children's libraries

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to evaluate two metadata schemas, AACR2+ and the International Children’s Digital Library’s metadata schema, in light of children’s information seeking behavior for book selection. While previous studies focus on the development of child-friendly interfaces, few of these studies discuss a metadata schema for children’s libraries. Given that effective information retrieval is based on well-constructed information organization, this study’s significance is its greater emphasis on information organization as a relevant factor than in previous studies. The methodology for this study consists of three parts: a meta-analysis of relevant research on children’s information seeking behaviors for book choices, a crosswalk of the metadata schemas, and a comparison of two data sets from the previous stages. The study finds that ICDL’s metadata schema tends to better reflect children’s unique information seeking behaviors for book choices as independent metadata elements than standard library cataloging does. Standard library cataloging tends to describe information reflecting children’s unique information seeking behaviors in a note area rather than describing in independent metadata elements. Therefore, by having independent and relevant metadata elements regarding the unique characteristics of children’s book choices, ICDL’s metadata schema provides more access points in a browse search system.