Of places and names: working with northern Canadian communities to enhance subject access to digital resources

Abstract

This paper describes a collaboration between researchers at the University of Alberta, staff at the Inuvialuit Cultural Resource Centre, and communities within the Inuvialuit Settlement Region (ISR) of Canada’s Northwest Territories to develop a culturally appropriate and relevant metadata framework for a digital library of cultural resources. To develop the first draft metadata framework, the Digital Library North (DLN) project team carried out an extensive critical examination of relevant literature, conducted surveys and interviews with community members, and completed an information audit of a core collection for the digital library. Analysis of the information audit, survey responses, and interview transcripts indicated that the metadata should include resource type, language(s) and dialect(s), topic(s), variant forms of names of people and places, individuals or organizations and their roles, audience, and access and reuse conditions, and should allow for community addition of metadata in the form of keywords, tags or stories. A digital library prototype including several key collections and incorporating many of the metadata desirables has been developed and will be tested with the community in May 2016. As broad a range of community members as possible will interact with the digital library and will be asked to provide feedback on the look and feel and ease of use of the prototype, and to respond to specific questions about the metadata elements (including their names and content). The feedback gained from the community will inform the next iteration of the metadata framework and the digital library interface.