Monitoring Quality of Digital Collections

Purpose

A primary goal of the institutional repository is to provide long term access to its digital resources. We provide high quality materials by creating or converting materials using well established standards and best practices in digital libraries. Performing a periodic review of digital content will help ensure the overall integrity, consistency and usability of these digital objects. This review can also support identifying workflow issues, discussions on logistics and communicating collections statistics.

Methodology/Approach

This overview should be a separate process from the daily or routine digitization workflow. The frequency of review will depend on various factors; new projects or high volume collections may need more frequent reviews than collections with little activity. The objective of the review is to confirm digital objects are well formed and adhere to quality requirements as defined in the collection’s formal documentation such as the metadata application profile and technical specifications set worth in the digitization plan.

Checklist

• Confirm metadata is complete; all required fields are present and in the designated format/syntax

• Perform automatic checks to validate digital specifications are being meet, using such tools as DROID, JHOVE or Exif Viewer¹

• Perform visual review for a sampling of online records
  

• Conduct inventory of master files, comparing final master files to online items before transferring to permanent storage

For more specific guides, please see Quality control checks

Selected Bibliography

Fabio Sartori, Miguel Ángel Sicilia and Nikos Manouselis, ‘A Fine-Grained Metric System for the Completeness of Metadata’ (presented at the Metadata and Semantic Research Third International Conference, MTSR, Milan, Italy,: Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2009), 83-94 <doi:10.1007/978-3-642-04590-5>

Feng Luan, Thomas Mestl and Mads Nygård, ‘Quality Requirements of Migration Metadata in Long-Term Digital Preservation Systems’, in Metadata and Semantic Research, 2010, 172-182 <doi:10.1007/978-3-642-16552-8_17>

Hillmann, Diane I., Dushay, Naomi, and Phipps, Jon, ‘Improving Metadata Quality: Augmentation and Recombination’ (presented at the Dublin Core Metadata Conference, DC-2004, eCommons@Cornell, 2004) <http://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/7897> [accessed 9 February 2012]

Jenn Riley, Kurt Whitsel, ‘Practical Quality Control Procedures for Digital Imaging Projects’, OCLC Systems & Services, 21 (2005), 40-48 <doi:10.1108/10650750510578145>

José Barateiro, Gonçalo Antunes, Filipe Freitas, José Borbinha, ‘Designing Digital Preservation Solutions: A Risk Management-Based Approach’, International Journal of Digital Curation, 5 (2010) <http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/143> [accessed 9 February 2012]

Wendy Robertson, ‘ALCTS Webinar: Repository Metadata: Challenges of Interoperability’, 2011 <http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/alcts/confevents/upcoming/webinar/irs/041311.cfm> [See Related Doc http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1169&context=lib_pubs]