Social Metadata for Libraries, Archives and Museums Part 1: Site Reviews – Karen Smith-Yoshimura, Program Officer OCLC Research; Cyndi Shein, Assistant Archivist Getty Research Institute
“This report provides an overview of social metadata to enable cultural heritage institutions to better utilize their users’ expertise and enrich their descriptive metadata to improve their users’ experiences. Metadata helps users locate resources that meet their specific needs. But metadata also helps us to understand the data we find and helps us to evaluate what we should spend our time on. Traditionally, staff at libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) create metadata for the content they manage. However, social metadatacontent contributed by usersis evolving as a way to both augment and recontextualize the content and metadata created by LAMs. Many cultural heritage institutions are interested in gaining a better understanding of social metadata and also learning how to best utilize their users’ expertise to enrich their descriptive metadata and improve their users’ experiences. In order to facilitate this, a 21-member RLG Partners Social Metadata Working Group reviewed 76 sites relevant to libraries, archives, and museums that supported such social media features as tagging, comments, reviews, images, videos, ratings, recommendations, lists, links to related articles, etc. In addition, working group members surveyed site managers, analyzed the survey results and discussed the factors that contribute to successfuland not so successfuluse of social metadata. They also considered issues related to assessment, content, policies, technology, and vocabularies.”
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