Skill-Building in Subject Representation: Assessing Learning Outcomes through Analysis of Student-Created Metadata

Representation of topics, places, events and other entities that information resource is about (referred to as subject representation) is crucial in facilitating access to information. It is an integral part of one of the core competencies of information professionals defined by the American Library Association (ALA). Students in ALA-accredited professional degree programs develop knowledge and skills that prepare them for analyzing what information resource is about and representing this aboutness with a combination of free-text keywords/keyphrases and terms from controlled vocabularies that are widely used by practitioners in the field. This paper reports the results of the evaluation of professional competencies developed by future information professionals in the representation of an information resource’s aboutness in a real-life practical setting. The dataset used in this evaluation consists of over 18 thousand metadata records -- created over 12 years, mostly by students -- in the major digital collection that provides access to historical patents