Harmonizing Local Metadata Practices for Library Resources on the Internet Archive

Abstract

The University of Alberta Library began a project in 2023 to consolidate and harmonize the library’s metadata practices for material uploaded to the Internet Archive (IA). The broad range of metadata standards and requirements associated with the over 240,000 items uploaded by the library, along with the flexibility of the metadata schema designed by IA, presented a unique set of challenges to overcome in the project. With the intent of creating one or more metadata application profiles for IA’s schema, the library’s Metadata Strategies Unit initiated work to identify the needs of library stakeholders and created an initial set of functional requirements to guide the project. This project report provides an overview of the metadata problem and project design, an update on the work, as well as insights gained by the project team.