Assessing Metadata Utilization: An Analysis of MARC Content Designation Use

Abstract

Metadata schemes emerge to meet community and user requirements, and they evolve over time to meet changing requirements. This paper reports results of an analysis of a large sample of MARC 21 bibliographic records. MARC 21 is an encoding scheme related closely to metadata elements occurring in library bibliographic records. The records were analyzed for the utilization of content designation available in MARC 21. Results indicate that less that 5% of available content designation accounts for over 80% of occurrences .The implications of these findings affect indexing policies, system design, and can inform setting requirements for extending a metadata scheme based on a threshold of community requirements.