Cataloging and Metadata Commons^™

Generative Ai For Born-Digital Collections: A Case Study For Metadata Management In An Institutional Repository, Tang (Cindy) Tian

Journal Articles

This case study examines the application of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools, specifically ChatGPT-4o, ChatGPT-5, and Google Gemini 2.5 Flash, to streamline metadata extraction and creation for a born-digital collection within a digital repository environment. Testing four descriptive metadata elements—titles, abstracts, keywords, and full-text URLs—the study shows that AI improves efficiency in structured tasks but remains limited in semantic ones such as keyword matching. Results demonstrate that AI can streamline metadata workflows for small or resource-constrained institutions while emphasizing the continuing importance of human oversight and ethical responsibility in AI-assisted metadata workflows.

How To Train Your Digital Commons, Savanna Nolan, Wendy Moore

Presentations

Creating and managing institutional repositories using tools like Digital Commons can seem large and intimidating at first, but you too can train these monsters to do your bidding! The UGA Law Library will discuss three strategies we've used to be more efficient, create new workflows, and increase public discoverability by partnering with state and national digital libraries. We will focus on the ingestion of law school journals, digitization of historical photographs, recordings, and treatises, and the metadata to facilitate wider access.

Establishing Digital Collections: Advocacy And Working With Institutions, Donica Swann

Library Scholarship

Discussion of emerging trends in digital preservation with an outline of ideal digital repository goals, assessment of content management and digital asset management systems, and tips for using digital collections in the classroom. Presentation concludes with ways to advocate for digital archives through collaboration with institutions.

Establishing Best Practices In Institutional Repository Organization, Scott Bacon

Digital Commons Southeastern User Group Meeting (2020) (Archived)

On the one-year anniversary of the CCU Digital Commons repository the organization of the Collections / Communities.html page was reviewed to gauge the need for revisions. Over 100 Digital Commons sites were examined to see how other repository managers organized their Collections pages. Top-level communities were coded into Community Types and were analyzed to surface trends in current practice. This presentation reviews trends in practice that emerged during research, as well as some of the best practices that were identified, including planning, iteration, labeling, limiting jargon, and finding a balance with top-level and nested content. Suggestions for improvement are given …

Facilitating Collaborative Metadata Creation For Faculty-Initiated Digital Projects, R. Cecilia Knight, Elizabeth Rodrigues, Rebecca Ciota

Publications

The usability and long-term preservation of digital humanities projects, such as a digital archive or other project built around digitized materials, depend on thoughtful and thorough metadata creation. The variety of expertise required to create high-quality metadata for digital humanities projects practically requires a collaborative approach. Putting the call for collaboration into practice requires tools that are accessible and functional for all collaborators. Research on tools for metadata creation has tended to focus either on tools for librarians to manage digital project metadata or on tools for independent author metadata creation (Greenberg, 2003; Crystal & Greenberg, 2005). The …

Here Come The Bots: Six Tips When Designing Your Ir's Metadata For Improved Discoverability, Rachel S. Evans

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

Rachel Evans draws from her experience as a web developer and a recent webinar on discoverability to compose a list of six tips for creating and maintaining strong metadata in digital repositories with SEO in mind. Each tip includes a personalized summary for why it is important, especially when Google bots crawl your site. The tips include a mix of best practices and common sense advice for rising to the top of search results.

TechScans is a blog to share the latest trends and technology tools for technical services law librarians. The official blog of the TS-SIS and OBS-SIS AALL …

Gla Conference Review: Workshop On Digitization For Small Institutions, Rachel S. Evans

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

Rachel Evans summarizes the recent Georgia Library Association (GLA) conference held in Macon, GA in October 2019. Specifically Evans reviews in detail a workshop on digitization for small institutions. The workshop and by extension the blog post review share valuable resources for project managers working on digitization in their libraries and within their digital repositories as well as information about metadata standards and best practices.

TechScans is a blog to share the latest trends and technology tools for technical services law librarians. The official blog of the TS-SIS and OBS-SIS AALL groups.

Authority Control In Digital Commons: Why Bother?, Laura Edwards

EKU Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Authority control provided by Digital Commons is basic. Other than author names, Digital Commons does not provide much in the way of authority control for other fields, such as faculty advisor/mentor names or department names. Standardizing name fields has several benefits, not least of which is the increased precision of reports that institutions can create to highlight the impact of faculty mentorship activities as well as the scholarship output of departmental entities on campus. Institutions that want to ensure the consistency of names across submissions to their Digital Commons repository, especially for self-submitted submissions, must develop their own methods for …

Extending The Institutional Repository To Include Undergraduate Research, Eleta Exline

University Library Scholarship

While a primary strategy of scholarly communication initiatives has been to encourage faculty participation in institutional repositories (IRs), with some process and workflow customization, IR participation can be successfully extended to undergraduate students, with benefits to both the student and institution. Drawing observations from the University of New Hampshire Library's work collecting undergraduate honors theses and other student research, this article discusses customization strategies for creating an effective workflow for student self-deposit using an iterative, feedback-based approach, and the benefits, challenges,and potential concerns of encouraging undergraduate participation in institutional repositories.

Streaming The Archives: Repurposing Systems To Jumpstart A Media Digitization Program, Talea Anderson

Library Scholarship

Presenting lessons learned by the archives at Central Washington University during the first year of its new media digitization program. This poster, presented in 2015 at ACRL's national conference, demonstrates how the archives jumpstarted its program by using available systems--an institutional repository and cloud-based streaming service--to disseminate digitized media. The poster presents advantages and disadvantages uncovered while using these repurposed systems, including consequences for metadata, workflow, interoperability, and discoverability.

Institutional Repository And Archival Collaborations At Unlv Libraries: Who's In, Who's Out?, Tom D. Sommer

Library Faculty Presentations

The University Archives has become an integral part of an academic institution. It has met its role as the repository for the rich history of an institution. They have met the challenges of a changing environment at many points in their history. The most recent change being the addition of born-digital materials into their collections. However, there is an opportunity to collaborate with another unit within academic libraries. The introduction and growth of institutional repositories (IR) on college campuses has provided an opportunity for university archives. An IR’s goal is to preserve the intellectual output of an institution. This is …

Data Management For Research Grants: A Marquette Pilot Project, Rose Fortier, Lynn K. Whittenberger

Library Faculty Research and Publications

Presenters will report on an ongoing pilot project to manage data generated by National Science Foundation grants using bepress’ Digital Commons institutional repository software. The challenge of creating a home for data on a repository created for publications was met through the creation of a series that brings together all grant output, i.e. raw and aggregated data, publications, presentations, and other research output. Further challenges in obtaining and managing varying formats of raw data (numerical, image, video, sound), and large volumes of data will be discussed. Metadata for series with such diverse formats presents its own difficulties, especially when a …

Utilizing Ir Content Discovery Streams, Marianne A. Buehler

Library Faculty Presentations

Institutional repositories (IRs) host an abundance of unique and valued digital content. The premise of garnering scholarly and local collection materials is to engage them for visibility and accessibility. As an additional tool to assist in the process of creating an infrastructure for reachable content, the WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway tool enables academic libraries to target individual repository collections to minimally harvest the metadata and be visible through WorldCat.org and OAIster. Collection items display their metadata while available full-text deposits from the Gateway create links to expose an IR’s record and the object itself that could include an article or …

Engaging Your Campus In Utilizing Institutional Repositories, Marianne A. Buehler

Library Faculty Presentations

Essentials of IR Success
- Institutional repository (IR) best practices: engagement with administrators, faculty, staff, and students
- Acquisition of research scholarship, publications, theses/dissertations, and other research objects
- Successful marketing strategies, best practices for garnering IR content, and developing open access mandates

From Digital Library To Institutional Repository: A Brief Look At One Library’S Path, Marianne A. Buehler, Marcia Trauernicht

Library Faculty Research

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of the initial transformation of one academic library’s digital media library into the institutional repository (IR) of its entire academic organization. Design/methodology/approach – Description of an academic digital library’s evolution into an institutional repository, accompanied by both practical and philosophical analyses. Findings – Materials supporting an academic institution’s scholarship (from colleges and from supporting organizations on campus) can play an important part in the success of an institutional repository. Standards for metadata content, data structures and hierarchies of collections must be followed consistently, and adequate storage for digital …

The Evolving Impact Of Institutional Repositories On Reference Librarians, Marianne A. Buehler, Adwoa Boateng

Library Faculty Research

Purpose – The paper's purpose is to share the insights that the staff of the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) Libraries (Wallace Library, RIT Archives, and the Cary Collection) gained into the role of reference librarians in establishing and operating an institutional repository (IR). Design/methodology/approach – The paper conducts a literature review on a range of published (1999-2005) works to research the background of IRs and to incorporate it with the authors' own experiences. Findings – The research findings, involving implementing IRs and specifically the effect on the role of the reference librarian in academic libraries, were found to be …