A few months back, we learned about some useful tools for metadata auditing. The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center shared these tools with other Service Hubs in the Digital Public Library of America network, including MWDL. I customized NCDHC’s tools to reflect the required and recommended fields in the MWDL Dublin Core Application Profile. We have started to use them to audit metadata for new collections submitted for aggregation into MWDL, and they really speed up this process!

Now our collections partners can use them as well for their own metadata auditing while creating or revising collections. These tools make it easy to examine the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) provision of metadata from your digital assets management system, so you can check it for conformance to MWDL and DPLA standards. They display the OAI data in an attractive, easy-to-read format, so you don’t have to pore through records one by one or look at hundreds of lines of tagged XML. 

Go to MWDL’s site for the DPLA OAI Aggregation Tools and speed up your metadata auditing!  So far, I have adapted them for use with the Qualified Dublin Core metadata format, specifically CONTENTdm’s “oai_qdc”. We will release them for simple Dublin Core (“oai_dc”) soon. 

1. QDC Mapping Checker shows the values by field for all records in a given collection.
2. Required Data Checker shows any missing values for required and recommended fields in a given collection. 

Let us know what you think, and new functionality you would like to see to make checking your metadata faster and easier. Contact me at sandra.mcintyre@utah.edu with your comments.