Conference Agenda

Florida State University and the Sunshine State Digital Network have been working to implement inclusive description practices in our online repositories and discovery layers. Through inclusive description centered on an active, critical awareness of bias, privilege, and power and an ethos of deliberate care used in the assessment, creation, and refinement of descriptive texts we are increasing accessibility of our collections in unserved and underserved communities seeking meaningful connections with their histories. Learn about our approach and how these practices can be implemented to expand access and increase discovery of content in our open repositories.

This submission addresses concepts associated with Rioxx version 3.0, the schema and specification for which was published in late 2023, following feedback gleaned during OR2023. ‘Rioxx: The Research Output Schema’ proposes a metadata profile to better ensure superior harvesting and ergo aggregation of scholarly content. It also promote greater semantic interoperability, as well as the graphing of essential research output relations. To assist with its metadata modelling, Rioxx version 3.0 introduces the concept of direct and external custodianship. This submission will explore this concept, establish how custodianship is reflected in the Rioxx schema, and demonstrate how such modelling benefits both repositories and external software agents (such as harvesters and aggregators). The submission will also demonstrate how Rioxx can be used to underpin aspects of open research policy monitoring.

Museums, archives, galleries, and libraries have balanced their responsibility to protect the world’s most important cultural artifacts with their roles as important pillars of public education. However, these goals become increasingly at odds with each other if the institution doesn’t take a deliberately decolonial, and anticolonial, stance on the metadata that accompanies the object even to open access destinations like Wiki Commons, Internet Archive, and Curationist. Left unexamined, these records still carry the legacies of colonization, visible in the metadata of digitized collections from major institutions like the British Museum.

This presentation outlines the necessary role of decolonial practice in GLAM-field digitization projects as well as in the digital tools that make this content available to public audiences. By centering on the co-developed metadata tools of Curationist, we will offer not only an introduction to this platform and its uses to digital art and open education, but also a method of online community development that centers indigenous data sovereignty, community engagement, and decolonization practices to rebalance the power dynamic in collections-based open education.

In comparison to established commercial bibliometric datasets, open datasets such as OpenAlex and OpenAIRE have not only the advantage of allowing greater transparency. They also have less restrictive selection processes, which allows for a better representation of underrepresented communities. However, since the open repositories used as sources follow various standards, providers of big datasets need to go through metadata aggregation and metadata enrichment processes. Such processes are not always carefully documented, and it is therefore difficult to understand which kind of data they include, and which metadata quality is to be expected.

This presentation handles two questions: How can we understand which methods big aggregators use to aggregate and to enrich the metadata they retrieve? Which practices enable some communities to outperform, in terms of metadata quality, other comparable communities in big aggregators? To answer, I will present results from the project TOBI, in which tools to understand the structure of datasets and to evaluate metadata quality are designed. Those tools and the information they provide are not only relevant for organizations who want to use transparent and sustainable data, but also for open repository managers who want to ensure visibility and dissemination of data of the highest quality.