Metadata has always been an area that I wanted to plunge in and dedicate some time to explore and test different methods for achieving more consistency and efficiency.
Over the past 8 months I was privileged to work on several large-scale metadata projects and participate in the process that we call ETL (extract, transform, load)
I was involved in the biggest metadata remediation project at UNLV Digital collections. As we are migrating to a new DAMS we had to clean up thousands of records to prepare the data sets for move. Yes, that's right - thousands! I successfully completed cleaning up of over 125,000 legacy metadata records. This included mapping to new metadata fields, cleaning up subjects, subject analysis of data sets, analyzing subject scope notes and mapping subjects from controlled vocabularies we no longer use (TGM, LCSH) to FAST and ATT terms that we adopted; work on the genre field and genre terms, remediation and authority files updates with thousands of name authorities. The process was a roller coaster with many ups and downs, but eventually all my remediated metadata turned out great! During the process I experimented with different methods and multiple approaches so I can efficiently move through the clean up process and I learned how to achieve consistency not just in one collection, but in all collections of our institution.
For all my remediation work I used Excel - it's such a powerful tool that allows various types of data transformations. I was so fascinated from what I can accomplish in Excel so I held a 75-min workshop at the Joint Annual Meeting of the Conference of Inter-mountain Archivists and the Society of Southwest Archivists. At that workshop I shared some of my best practices for efficient data clean up.
Additionally, I was invited to deliver a metadata overview presentation for beginners at the Nevada Statewide Large-scale Digitization Workshop held at the UNLV Libraries.
Links to the presentation slides are available below for more information.
Metadata rules and knowing how to manage it is a mandatory skill for all digital librarians!