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Making Metadata Work for Everyone: A Functional View of Metadata in the Scholarly Supply Chain

Session 4D: Making Metadata Work for Everyone: A Functional View of Metadata in the Scholarly Supply Chain

It’s well understood that metadata is a driving force behind the development and distribution of scholarly content. Metadata is no longer just citation information; its function is much deeper and broader than bibliographic. In fact, some consider metadata to be the core ecosystem around an article or monograph. Yet the industry still struggles with metadata issues:

  • Lack of consistent licensing information in metadata feeds
  • Revision control for metadata corrections
  • Lack of resources to generate metadata to the correct standard
  • Discrepancy between the needs of STM vs SSH content

This panel session will illustrate the flow of metadata through the content life cycle: from researcher to reader and all the players in between. We will discuss and depict what’s important from the perspective of an author, publisher, service provider, platform provider, librarian, funders, and readers. Panelists will speak to their business requirements as we follow metadata examples through a publishing workflow, pausing to discuss known issues that need to be addressed such as

  • Proprietary DTDs
  • Definition of publication date in an open digital world (e.g., version of record, accepted manuscript, online publication)
  • “Quality” as a matter of perspective

Attendees will walk away from this presentation with the understanding that my metadata is your metadata is our metadata.