Answering the Call for more Accountability

Abstract

Although the issue of metadata quality is recognized as an important topic within the metadata research community, the cultural heritage sector has been slow to develop methodologies, guidelines and tools for addressing this topic in practice. This paper concentrates on metadata quality specifically within the museum sector and describes the potential of data-profiling techniques for metadata quality evaluation. A case study illustrates the application of a general purpose data-profiling tool on a large collection of metadata records from an ethnographic collection. After an analysis of the results of the case-study the paper reviews further steps in our research and presents the implementation of a metadata quality tool within an open-source collection management software.