Ever want to know what PA Digital’s Metadata Team is really up to when they review collection records? Have any metadata questions so shocking you wouldn’t even ask your own grandmother? Are you convinced that your institution’s metadata is “not good enough,” without realizing that most institutions encounter the same exact issues as you? Experience recurring nightmares about date standardization? Bring your true metadata confessions to this light-hearted but highly informative hands-on workshop.

Metadata Anonymous will give current and future contributors to PA Digital a chance to see an actual metadata review live in-person through utilizing our aggregator tool (http://test.padigital.org) and the free open-source software OpenRefine. We will review metadata from a real institutional collection (from Temple University) and assess metadata quality. We will also show the typical metadata issues we have been encountering in PA collections so far. The second half of the workshop will take participants on a guided tour of OpenRefine’s basic and intermediate operations. Free exploration time will then be provided, during which participants can practice their skills through a set of guided OpenRefine challenges, or work in consultation with the moderators on a problem dataset of their choice. No OpenRefine experience is necessary, only an interest in manipulating metadata and tabular (spreadsheet) data. Please bring your own laptop for this component.

This fun and engaging workshop will empower attendees to improve their own metadata quality for ingest into the DPLA, another digital aggregation platform, or their own local repositories.

December 7, 2017:  8:30am-12:30pm at the Free Library of Philadelphia

Register here!

submitted by:
Michael Carroll,
Temple University