Metadata for Everyone: Identifying Metadata Quality Issues Across Cultures

Metadata is crucial to the dissemination and communication of research. Quality metadata facilitates discovery and access and provides contextual, technical, and administrative information in a standard form. Yet metadata are also sites of tension between sociocultural representations, resource constraints, and standardized systems. Formal and informal interventions may be interpreted as metadata quality issues, political acts to assert identity, or strategic curatorial choices to maximize discoverability and visibility. This presentation documents the work of Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and Crossref on the Metadata for Everyone project to understand how metadata quality, consistency, and completeness impact individuals and communities. Working from a sample of records known to have erroneous, incomplete, or otherwise imperfect metadata, we set out to identify and classify issues stemming from how metadata and communities press up against each other to intentionally reflect (or not) cultural meanings.