| START Conference Manager |
ASIST 2012 Annual Meeting
Baltimore, MD, October 26-30, 2012
Tooling the Aggregator's Workbench: Metadata Visualization
Through Statistical Text Analysis
Katrina Fenlon, Miles Efron and Peter Organisciak
Monday, 8:00am
Digital library interoperability efforts have succeeded in making large-scale aggregation of digital collections technically feasible. As silos are gradually dismantled and diverse digital collections are increasingly unified into aggregations, data heterogeneity presents growing challenges to aggregators. Comprehension of massive aggregates and efficient metadata quality analysis are aggregator imperatives that rely on scalable evaluation techniques. This paper describes novel applications of visualization techniques based on statistical text analysis to the evaluation and maintenance of a large-scale aggregation of descriptive, cultural heritage metadata. These techniques, and their implementation as part of an aggregator's workbench, provide new, administrator-oriented perspectives on metadata aggregations, in order to improve aggregators' capacity to evaluate metadata quality and topical coverage in a scalable way.