Metadata Quality Control for Content Migration: The Metadata Migration Project at the University of Houston

Abstract

The decision to migrate digital objects from one digital asset management system to another creates an excellent opportunity to clean and standardize descriptive metadata. The processes involved in moving large amounts of data from one platform to another lend themselves to automated analysis and remediation of metadata problems. The University of Houston (UH) Libraries established a Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) Implementation Task Force in early 2014 to explore possibilities for implementing a more robust repository architecture for the UH Digital Library (DL). During the digital asset management system testing process, the UH Libraries Metadata Services Coordinator developed a set of scripts that programmatically accessed the data in the UHDL through the existing digital asset management system’s application programming interface (API), created reports that were used to identify and correct problems, and laid the foundation for publishing UHDL data as linked data. This project report discusses the background for the work of the DAMS Implementation Task Force work and the metadata quality improvements that resulted from it as part of a new Metadata Migration Project.