Research Data Management: Metadata 101 (Oct 2019): Getting Started

"The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from." -author unknown

• Define your data elements and structure

Dublin Core - Defines fifteen basic metadata elements for resource discovery in a cross-disciplinary information environment, designed for interoperability. Learn more about the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. 

• What disciplinary or domain standards are relevant?

Research Data Alliance (RDA) Metadata Standards Directory - Find standards by subject area; view tools and use cases.

Disciplinary Metadata - from the Digital Curation Centre in the UK

Examples:

Arts - Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA)

Ecological data - Ecological Metadata Language

Biological data - Darwin Core

Geographic data - ISO19115; see also FGDC - Federal Geographic Data Committee

Social science data - Data Documentation Initiative (DDI)

• Where (how) will you be sharing your data?

Registry of Research Data Repositories - repositories may have their own requirements for data submission.

For example: USDA Ag Data Commons

Define content standards, for example:

• 10-03-19
• 03.10.19
• 19/10/03

Preferred: 2019-10-03 (YYYY-MM-DD, based on ISO 8601)

Define value standards:

• Use controlled vocabularies/thesauri/ontologies

Cautionary Tale:

• NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter Disaster

What's in a Data Dictionary and more from USGS

Creating a Data Dictionary with template from USDA Ag Data Commons

Learning Data Analytics - LinkedIn Learning course includes Creating a Data Dictionary 

Good list of metadata editors and tools from DataONE - includes editors for Geospatial and Ecological data as well as editors for more generic data.

Additional Metadata editors:

Geospatial Data -

• CSAS Metadata Program - New web-based metadata generator/editor from the USGS
• Formal metadata: information and software - Included tools, tips and advanced tops from the USGS

Ecological data - Morpho - Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity

Bioldiversity data - Darwin Archive Spreadsheet Processor from Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) generates EML from a spreadsheet template

Scientific data - Directory Interchange Format (DIF)

Social Science and Archiving -

• DDI Tools - List of Freeware and Commercial tools for working with DDI docs from Data Documentation Initiative (DDI)
• EAD Toolkit - A variety of EAD related tools from the California Digital Library

Humanities, Social Sciences and Linguistics - TEI Tools from Text Encoding Inititiative (TEI)

Metadata cleanup - 

• Cleanup - guide from Free Your Metadata using Open Refine

You may need to use a crosswalk to convert your metadata to a different standard. Examples include:

FGDC to a variety of schemas - from NOAA

CDWA to VRA 4.0 to MODS to EAD - from The Getty