Harvesting community tags and annotations to augment institutional repository metadata

Abstract

One of the greatest challenges facing managers of institutional repositories today is the cost of providing high quality, precise metadata that satisfies the search requirements of their many different user groups. Social tagging systems such as Flickr, del.icio.us, Connotea and You.tube enable communities to tag photos, web pages, scientific publications and videos with organically-evolved, community relevant vocabularies and to share their tags through the Web. But is there a way that repository managers can exploit these new community tagging movements to enhance their collections’ metadata?

If users are provided with simple tagging services, can they be encouraged to generate meaningful, useful metadata that can then be harvested and exploited? This presentation will describe a number of semantic tagging and annotation services that we have developed for open repositories of social sciences and humanities data (indigenous collections, linguistic recordings, publications). It will also discuss possible solutions to the associated social and technical challenges that include: motivating users to attach annotations; ensuring quality control and authentication of the annotations; techniques for harvesting meaningful useful metadata (using OAI PMH); exploiting the secondary metadata to improve the search and browse capabilities over the repositories; differentiating between primary and secondary metadata in the presentation of search results.