Metadata Services
MIT Libraries

Projects in Process

The creation of the Metadata Unit was made possible by the Libraries' collaboration with the OpenCourseWare project (OCW). With tens of thousands of digital resources to organize, OCW sought the Libraries' help in their selection and creation of metadata. The Libraries helped plan workflows and participated in content management system design. OCW agreed to partner with the Metadata Services Unit for metadata creation. This is a collaborative process. During course creation, OCW staff create preliminary metadata records. The OCW staff is trained by the Metadata Services Unit and has direct contact with the designers of the course. Before the course is published on the OCW public website, the metadata records are reviewed and enhanced by Metadata Services. Unit personnel ensure that the metadata meets appropriate standards, add subject headings, and verify that the names of course contributors are in the correct format. Metadata Services has also participated in designing the search interaction for OCW in order to take full advantage of the available metadata.

 

The scope of the collaboration between Wesleyan University and MIT Libraries on the LOLA projects includes:

• Clear definition of the different learning objects within the scope of the project.
• Best Practices for capturing learning object metadata that are cognizant of and conform to major standards and implementations (IEEE LOM, IMS, SCORM, Merlot, DC-ED, GEM, CanCore).
• Recommendations towards interoperability with other projects, portals and metadata schemes.
• Conceptual design of a user interaction that promotes good metadata gathering and use, including the allowance of metadata submission by the wide range of project participants over a distributed network.
• Definition of value spaces and taxonomies to be used within the metadata scheme.

The deliverable is a Metadata Implementation and Best Practices document containing:

• A conceptual model of the metadata scheme
• A data model and organization of user interactions
• Best practices for application of metadata
• Controlled Vocabularies
• An XML binding of the metadata record
• Suggested Interoperability efforts

 

The Metadata Services Unit entered the papers from the 2002 through 2004 Singapore-MIT Alliance Symposia into the MIT Libraries' DSpace Repository. At the instantiation of the 342 articles, the Unit provided metadata according to the DSpace implementation of the Dublin Core standard.

provides students and faculty with a flexible on-line environment to create, annotate and share media-rich documents for the teaching and learning of core humanistic subjects. Faculty can build subject-specific mini-archives to extend the use of multimedia materials in the classroom and thus further pedagogical innovation.

Based on open standards, the Metamedia framework allows the formation of learner communities across disciplines and distances and ensures interoperability with a wide range of current and future media resources.

The Metadata Services Unit is currently engaged in defining a metadata implementation for Metamedia that will include best practices for metadata creation and use and recommendations for ensuring interoperability with other Educational Technology Systems at MIT.